But don’t invest all your money in Nintendo stocks, either.

Nintendo unveiled its newest venture, the hand-held gaming device of the new wave: the Nintendo 3DS. Like its predecessors DS and DS-i, the 3DS will have wi-fi capability, play an expansive library of games, a touch screen with stylus, and fit snugly in your pocket (just don’t sit on it!).

In fact, it offers an even bigger library of games than the DS because it will not only play 3DS games, but be backwards compatible with all DS games as well! Furthermore, although one can only wonder the logic behind this, it will play old Gameboy games. These will be downloadable ROM’s, not the carts themselves, although I’d be inclined to buy one maybe since my own Gameboy has recently passed on to Calculator Heaven.

I predict a rough start for the 3DS, however. You can buy a PS2 for $99 (and recently with a free game as well, although not a great game by any standards). You can buy an XBox 360 for $199 and often with a free game or two included. You can buy a Wii for $150 on up, which of course only comes with one controller — Nintendo is notoriously dubious in marketing. Fork over the big bucks and get a Playstation 3 for $300 or $400 and have Sony Blu-Ray playability.

The 3DS will be right up there with the PS3 at $250 opening day. Yeah, $250. For a hand-held. In its defense, the Playstation Pocket was $200+ and still is pretty pricey. Then again, the PSP had web surfing, a photo viewer, video player and MP3 player too. Well, Nintendo knew what needed to be done to compete in the handheld market, which it already dominated (PSP’s rarely leave home).

Nintendo made the 3DS a pretty impressive package, at least on paper. It will have a web browser. Oh yeah, you’ll need to download some firmware supposedly to get that capability though — remember what I said about Nintendo’s marketing. It will have MP3 and AAC audio playback as well as a sound recorder with some functionality to make recording your prepubescent voice entertaining for you (and you alone). Nintendo claims it will be able to play 3D videos, although like the PSP I have a hunch they will need to be specially formatted, maybe software you can buy for your PC to convert 3D-DVD’s to 3DS-compatible movies.

But oh wait, it doesn’t stop there! The 3DS will also have an activity tracker which will keep track of what games you play and for long. It gets better! The tracker also acts as a pedometer! (That means it counts how far you’ve walked with it, not how many 8-year-olds you’ve molested.) If you walk enough, you’ll earn “coins” which you can spend in games or other applications.

For the photo-savvy, the 3DS will include a camera capable of taking 3D pictures. While in itself is nothing all that impressive, it is a nifty gimmick that people of all ages, especially kids, will enjoy for hours on end. It’s plausible that Nintendo will release a mini printer so you can print out your 3D pictures as anaglyphs, like how the Gameboy had a printer for its camera (yes, the Gameboy had a digital camera accessory). More than likely, though, you’ll be limited to sharing the pictures with other 3DS owners — another marketing ploy they’ve considered, I’m sure.

How can one share their photos with other 3DS users? With memory cards, of course! Not only that, since the 3DS is internet-capable, you will probably be able to transfer photos over the internet to your 3DS-wielding friends and family. Start buying those lotto tickets. Don’t worry, Jimmy would just fail college anyway.

Miis, the caricatures from the Wii, will appear on the 3DS as well. Since there’s a camera, you will probably be able to make one that actually looks like you. It looks at your photo and tries to pick the best Mii to fit your looks. Put your best face forward.

Things sort of get creepy here. There will be an application called Mii Plaza. Basically, when your 3DS is supposedly pwoered down in Sleep Mode, it’s not off and not really asleep — it’s recording not just how far you walk, but who you pass by with a 3DS. When you turn your 3DS back on and go to Mii Plaza, you can see everyone that you passed by, their names and their tracker info (see above). Yeah… I think this feature has appropriately earned

Back to the family-friendly stuff. The 3DS also has nestled inside of it a gyrometer, allowing games to sense the orientation of the 3DS while you play. In other words, you could some day be playing a Duck Hunt remake using the 3DS itself as the Light Gun! … Built into itself… which is a Light Gun… in itself… and shoot at… itself… which is a Light Gun in itself… at itself… … Screw it, it’s just cool!

The 3DS will also incorporate Augmented Reality. This is a cool technology that has been seen on YouTube and Nico Douga (Japanese YouTube-like site), although the videos on YouTube probably originated on Nico.  Basically, you have a little tablet which represents where a computer-generated image will appear, then a camera records the environment around that tablet. On your screen, you will see your environment and where the tablet is you will see a computer-generated image (CGI, if you ever wondered what that acronym stood for). This is nothing new, having appeared on the iPhone and other recent tech-toys. This video demonstrates and explains the process.

All of this means you can play with your what-the-fuck expensive 3DS without any games at all. For $4 you can download a crappy black-and-white Gameboy or some DS content. Oh yeah, if you already have a DS and downloaded stuff, you can transfer the data over to your 3DS. It really is backwards compatible, an issue Sony lost a huge fan base over recently when they removed the feature from the PS3.

Then again, seeing as how people pay $200 for a phone these days, maybe the 3DS will fair pretty well in its opening month after all.

But why is the 3DS so impressive? What guarantee do stockholders have that it’s not just a souped up Virtual Boy, Nintendo’s bastard child locked away in their attic munching on fish heads? For starters, the 3DS really is portable, unlike the Virtual Boy. Top that all off with the simple fact that the 3DS doesn’t use glasses or visors to present the pop-out 3D effects!

The Virtual Boy was state of the art on many levels, which is one of the trademarks of Nintendo. Compare Sony’s consoles to Microsoft’s consoles and you won’t see too much of a difference. Compare Nintendo’s and things go way out in left field. The Virtual Boy was one suck device, built around the basic concept of 3D imaging, which is projecting two slightly different images to each eye in order to create the illusion of a 3D projection. Just like the Viewfinders we played with as kids that presented 3D pictures though a binocular device, the Virtual Boy was, well, a very large, very expensive Viewfinder. Rather than pairs of photos, though, the Virtual Boy used digital images. These in themselves were new wave, although I don’t think they got popular What Nintendo did was use a strip of red LED’s (light-emitting diodes, if you didn’t know) that flashed very rapidly on spinning mirrors which reflected the light show to the gamer’s eyes. Red was cheapest, if you’re wondering why the system used red. The spinning mirrors made the one-dimensional strip of lights appear to be a 2D image to whichever eye was viewing it — and reportedly caused headaches and eye strain. The other eye would see a subtly different 2D image. This ocular disparity caused the gamer to perceive a 3D gaming environment. The virtual Boy flopped because Nintendo pushed it before it was finalized (it was supposed to be more compact, but technology hadn’t caught up) and the game library was laughable (about 20 or so, maybe fewer). The designer was unduly fired (he made the Gameboy for crying out loud) and Nintendo tried to forget about its failure.

Well, the 3DS isn’t like that at all. I can’t make any comments on the game library, although Nintendo claims it will have about 30 available in addition to the downloadables by the release date. The technology is state of the art, just like the Virtual Boy in its time. The system itself does the 3D rendering and it’s all in the display monitor. Just like 3D gaming monitors, such as iz3D (which has a free downloadable anaglyph driver you can use with any monitor to play your favorite Direct3D games in real 3D at www.iz3d.com), the 3DS lets you alter the distance between the images to suit your own visual comfort zone. This will also allow you to play the games in pure 2D with ideally no loss of gameplay (this is up to the game designers, but Nintendo is encouraging it).

What it ultimately comes down to is if Nintendo can get the game support from game programmers. This was an issue for the Virtual Boy because, I believe, the Virtual Boy required building two games at a time. What I mean is each eye ahd to have a game programmed for it. The left eye had to have one full collection of sprites and tiles, while the right eye had to have an entirely different collection of sprites and tiles.

The 3DS appears to me to use the same basic principles, whatever they may be, as how iz3D and Nvidia’s 3D monitors allow 3D playability of any Direct3D game and OpenGL (which isn’t supported in iz3D’s free driver). Games these days are often programmed with models. Just like model airplanes or cars sold in hobby stores, these models are 3D representations, although still in the 2D world of the computer monitor. All the data for the view angles are recorded in the model. What 3D video drivers do is render the models based on what camera angle the game says to use at any point in time. The iz3D and Nvidia drivers, as I discern, augment the camera information and render the models from a second camera angle. Both angles are rendered to the gamer (in two different lenses or colors, depending on the 3D mode the user chooses) at the same time, creating a real 3D effect. In other words, game designers for the 3DS should simply need to keep programming games as they do already — with 3D modeling software. I am guessing the programmers only need to specify one camera angle and the 3DS will handle the rest.

And the more I write about this, the more I fucking want the thing. Damn me and my fucking 3-day-a-week job! … Glad I ahve money saved up. !( *O*)