Nintendo puts glasses-free stereoscopic depth in a handheld

What happened

The top screen used a parallax barrier, a layer that sends slightly different images to each eye and produces depth without special eyewear. A physical slider let players dial the effect down or shut it off, and the company advised that young children avoid it. Below sat a touch screen inherited from the DS, joined by motion sensors, an analog slide pad and cameras facing both directions. Backward compatibility with the older library was built in, which mattered a great deal, because the DS had sold in numbers few systems in any category ever reach.

Early months went badly. Launch software gave buyers little reason to hurry, phones were absorbing the casual audience that had made the DS a phenomenon, and sales stalled. Within roughly half a year the price was cut sharply and early adopters were given a package of free downloadable games as compensation. Company president Satoru Iwata publicly took a reduction in his own pay. Once Mario, Pokemon, Animal Crossing and Monster Hunter titles arrived in volume, the handheld steadied and went on to a long and profitable life across several redesigns.

The world at the time

Stereoscopic 3D was briefly everywhere at the start of the decade. Cinemas charged premium ticket prices for it, television makers pushed 3D sets into showrooms, and consumer electronics companies treated depth as the next obvious upgrade to sell. Meanwhile, cheap and free games on smartphones were quietly pulling away the very buyers who had turned dedicated handhelds into a mass-market business.

What it changed

Later revisions of the family dropped the 3D feature altogether, and the company's next portable idea was a hybrid machine that also worked on a television. The broader 3D fashion faded across the whole electronics trade within a few years. The apology bundle of free games, for its part, was an early sign that digital storefronts had become a tool for managing unhappy customers.