Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray. It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hello again, everyone, Welcome to tech stuff. My name is Chris Poette and I am an editor at how stuff works dot Com. Sitting across from me, as always, his senior writer Jonathan Strickland. Great, Yes, shot the Invisible Swordsman reverted to movies. That was a quote.
That was a quote switch up. I had a different quote lined up, but then Mr Pellette made a reference to a certain movie and I had to follow suit. I like silly movies. I love that movie. Man. I saw that film at least three times in the theater. Really, yeah, well one for each, you know, amigo. And it wasn't
drown love this time. So, but today we wanted to talk about a device that I actually got some hands on time with some pretty in depth hands on time with the Nintendo three D S. Yes, funny you would say, in depth. Yes, let me put it this way. I'm not gonna have any more time with that particular device. No, no, And uh, you know I actually had a little time with that device too. And you said give me that. Yeah, okay,
so the first time I after that, I'm bitter. Yeah, well, I mean, like I said, I'm not playing with it
anymore either. Um. The first time I laid eyes upon the Nintendo three D S was at the two thousand and ten E three conference the Electronic Entertainment Expo was at the time that when you laid eyes on it, where the shaft of light came down from the ceiling and the Angel Chorus started singing, except that the angel course instead of going oh said it's to me, I'm not and yeah, I know the It was a big deal at E three. I mean, Nintendo had revealed this
new hardware. It had been years since Nintendo had done something besides the D S light right, it was. It wasn't just a simple tweak of the DS. It was a pretty major leap forward. Yes, and uh and so you can actually see the forward because it's in three D exactly. That was the big deal, was glasses free
three D in this device? Yep. Now, uh yeah, we usually say this at the beginning of the podcast such as this, but there was so much hype in this case that we've had several people asked us to do a show in the three D S, so we're happy to oblige, so happy in fact that how stuff works dot Com actually bought a three D S for us to try out because I wasn't at the show, so
I didn't get to see it for myself. Well, and I only got a chance to see it for about three minutes because you stood in line for around minutes to an hour unless you had a v I P pass. So people like seeing that's Brian Tong jumped right to the front and people like shlubby old me got in line with all the rest of the peons and we waited and waited and waited. Dude, why didn't you get a fast pass? I don't I know. I know I
know better by now clearly. I mean I know the right people, right, I just apparently I didn't leverage those relationships the way I should. My networking skills are are poor. So anyway, yeah, we've got a few minutes to look at. And it was very impressive that when one of the games they showed off was this Mario platform game Go Figure U that know, that used the three D in a very effective way, and that the three D actually was adjustable. There's a slider on the right side of
the screen. The three D screen, the DS, by the way, in case you have not seen one, is a handheld gaming device that has two screens. There's the screen that you're actually watching for the game and where the game action is happening, and then there is a touch screen interface system that you may use in the while playing a game, or you know, it may just be there is a decoration because you may be using the basic
controls like the game pad and the buttons. Right, and it looks a lot like the the D S light, which of which I have one um, except that there are some some pretty different features. I'm used to the typical Nintendo uh four direction D pad, Yes, and it has one of those, and yeah, but it also has a circular pad, an analog circular pad, so it's like a little joystick that your thumb sits on. Yeah, kind of, So the three D S kind of up the anti
with that. But yeah. The the cool thing was that the whole idea was that there was going to be this this glasses free three D experience And you might ask yourself, hey, how does that work? Well, I'll tell you. It's based upon a principle called parallax barrier. Now, in order for this to make sense, we got to talk about a few different concepts. First of all, let's talk
about parallax. We've talked about this before in other three D podcasts as podcast about three D not podcasts, but we're in three D. Well they were, but you had to have a special kind of earphones to listen to you. You kind of had to be here in the studio while we recorded it to be at all three dimensional. And even then that's stretching it for us. Let's be
on us. So parallax is based upon the whole idea that well, there are different things about parallax, right, but as far as three D vision goes, stereoscopic vision goes, parallax is based upon the fact that our eyes are not located in the same exact spot. Yeah, we would
be a cyclops. So if if you are a human being with two healthy, regular working eyes, then you can use parallax to determine how far away an object is and part and that's kind of based upon, uh, the the distance that the picture that you're getting out of your left eye versus the picture you're getting out of your right eye. And your brain puts these two pictures
together into a h an integrated picture. So you know, instead of getting instead of you sitting there and perceiving two different images, you actually perceive a single image based upon these two inputs, these two data inputs that are coming in at the same time. And so this is part of what helps you with your depth perception. It's
not the only thing, but it definitely helps. And that you know, your brain kind of takes in that information, says, based upon this information, that person is so many feet away, right, And so three D what three D does because that presents you two sets of images. Each eye only receives one of those images, one set, and then your brain puts those two sets together and that creates this what appears to be a three dimensional image, which is pretty cool.
You're you're tricking your brain into thinking that you're perceiving something that actually has depth as opposed to just heighten with right, groovy, right, Yes, you were looking at me like I wasn't sure whether you're gonna say something. Yeah. In our three D Cameras podcast, we talked about the ways in which you have to uh use technology to achieve this effect on the front end, you have to
create the technology. And uh, in order to do that with with a movie or a TV show, Um, they will often use two cameras spaced with with lenses spaced about as far apart as your eyes, because they have to use these two different pictures and combine them in a way that will allow you to see them in phoe three D. Yeah, exactly, and in the way that
your brain interprets as being three dimensions right now. Uh, the three DS has on its case on the outside two little cameras that are about that far apart, which aid and but that's not all of it. And I, you know, sort of sort of interrupted the glasses thing just because I wanted to give you an idea that yes, this this plays into the creation of the games because there have to be more than one image and there has to be some way to make it fool your
brain into thinking, uh that it's that distance apart. And that's one of the ways in which they create the game in order to do that. But then you have to see it. Now for TV or a movie, Uh, we usually think about having to wear the glasses and a couple of different ways to actually more than a couple there three or four different ways, right, But but basically the basic way is that you overlay these two sets of images on top of one another, and then
you find some way to filter them out. Filter one set of images out per eye now, might be through color or or polarity of the light. Um, there are a lot of different ways, but that that requires glasses. Now, glasses free. This is something that Chris Knight got to see in person. We actually took a field trip a couple of years ago out to a company that does glasses free lenticular displays, yes, which was interesting and also
kind of disorienting. Yeah. Yeah, Plus I was a little worried because I had to forge my mom's signature on the permission slip from the field trip because he had been a bad boy up to that I was distracting others in class. But um, yeah, on on on a big screen TV. Uh, you can use lenticular displays to
achieve the three D effect without having to wear glasses. Now, if you've ever had one of those little poster sorry postcards or uh, I remember actually when I had a drink that I got back in the days of atari pac Man For I actually have a pac Man sticker and it uses a lenticular film. Yeah, there's a lenticular film that goes over the the images because there's actually more than one image on that sticker, but but you can only see one image depending upon the angle you're
looking from. Yeah, if you run your finger over it, or your finger nail even more specifically, it sounds like you're walking in corduroy pants, you get that. Yeah, there's a little you can feel the ridges. Yeah, yeah, I I used to have a postcard that was Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader having a lightsaber duel, and you know, you tilt the postcard back and forth and it would look like they were fighting. It was a very limited
amount of animation. And the way that worked is that those that plastic film you can think of those is actually little tiny lenses that, when at a certain angle, allow you to view the image just from you know, you could just view one set of lines and all
those lines together make up an image. But if you tilt it a little to the right or to the left, then you're looking at a different set of lenses, and those only let you see a different set of lines, And so you can put several different sets of lines all crammed together. These are basically bits of information, and then by tilting the postcard back and forth, you're seeing this these different images, whole images in sequence, and if
you do it fast enough, it looks like it's animated. Yes, and I was thinking we probably should since I'm sure someone will want to know about that TV. The TV works on that biggest scale. The The only problem is there are these little it's it's kind of hard to
explain in non three D, but they're little areas. If you've ever been in a perfect stereo set up where you're in the right exact space and you can totally make out the left and the right channel, but if you move a little to the left of the right, or forward or backward, all of a sudden, you lose that true stereo effect. It's it's like that for the t vs, because if you step just hair at a place, all of a sudden, the image gets distorted a little bit and you can't see it in three D anymore.
Dead spots, Yeah, which is why you don't see that on every three D TV. Right. The way I I describe it usually is imagined that the television, or in this case, the three D S is in the center of a pie. I'll see you had to bring pie into it. Now I'm gonna be thinking about that. And and now a pie that's been sliced, right, so you've got the three D s's at the center of the pie.
So you've got these slices that that converge at the three D S. If you happen to be positioned in the middle of a slice of pie, then you get the three D experience. But if you are bestride two slices of pie, if that slices in between betwixt thy feet, then then you've got to end up with this weird, muddled image. And it's gonna not it's gonna look really kind of cloudy. Your brain is not really gonna know what to do with it, and uh, and it really
is disorienting. I can tell you from experience, because one of the things we found out while playing with the Nintendo three DS is it's a little disorienting. Disorienting when you're playing it yourself, but even more so if you try to watch someone else play, because you are going to be looking over that person's shoulder and you're not
going to be in that sweet spot. Now That's one of the reasons why that three DS was considered to be viable was because if you're playing a handheld device, generally you're holding it in front of yourself and you're holding it about the right distance away for that three D to work right, You're you're holding it around, you know, fourteen to eighteen inches away from your face. You're holding it in front of you more more likely than not,
and so it's kind of a controlled environment. Whereas if you were to put this in, say a television, well then you have to arrange your entire living room so that you are always seated in one of those sweet spots to get the three D or else you'll just get a massive headache. So if you were to sit a little to the left on the couch, suddenly you can't see the three D image anymore, and and it's just a jumbled mess onto television. So the three D S the idea was that the form factor suited that
three D technology. Now you were talking about how you have to have two different sets of images, it's it's and that's true with these three D games if you have it on three D mode. And the nice thing about the three D S so you can turn the three D mode off if you If you slay the three D switch all the way down, it goes to two D mode and you only have a single set of images if you because you have to have two sets of images. That means that you have to have
custom games for this device. Right. You can't suddenly start playing all your old Nintendo DS games in three D right then, Now it is compatible with those old games, but you are not going to get the three D effect because those old games were not designed with two
sets of images exactly. Another thing I should point out is that if you have any problems with your site in one eye, like let's say that you you're blind in one eye, or you just have a medical condition um that that messes with your vision in one eye, you may not be able to see three D through parallax views the way that a person with good vision
in both eyes could. Right. Because of that, Nintendo kind of is kind of shying away from making three D an integral necessary part of games on the three D S. In other words, you can buy three D games for the three D S, but there won't be any games in which the three D component is necessary for you
to be able to play that game. Now, that goes against the Mario game that I saw when I was at E three, Because the Mario game I saw, if you turned the three D setting off, you suddenly could not see the platforms that you had to jump on as you were running through the levels. You can only see them in the three D mode. So that meant that the three D was necessary for you to be able to play effectively. Uh. Well, now on Nintendo saying well, that may not be the best idea because there are
some people who just can't enjoy games. Uh and so if it's in just three D mode, so we don't want to, we don't want to you know, discount them. We don't want to leave them out of the fun. So three D should just be kind of a feature. It's at that point one could argue, and I have made this argument, the three D feature on the three D s becomes more of a gimmick than a feature
because it's not necessary to the game. It's not like the WE games where the WE remote is integrated part of gameplay, right, I mean with those games, like the games that use the WE remote or the the the WE fit board, those things, you know, that's part of
the gameplay. If if there's not a simple way where you just switch that out and use a regular controller, that that's more of a game that was where it's integrated with the whole system, right Like for example, the Mario Kart WE has the WE steering wheel, but the WE stealing steering is essentially an inert piece of plastic in which you snap the uh WE remote, So you don't need the steering wheel to play that game. You just hold the WE remote sideways and you know, make
room room sounds. You can argue, Yeah, you could argue that that that steering wheel is more or less a gimmick, although I would assume it would make it a little easier to hold and manipulate the WE remote in that case. But you don't need the little tennis racket thing either to play exactly yeah, or like one that shaped like a wand to play a Harry Potter game or something along those lines. Yeah, So it feels almost more like that,
like one of the kind of superfluous WE accessories. That's kind of how the three D feature on the three D S feels. If you remove the three D as an integrated part of the game, but let's talk a little bit about you know, we we mentioned lenticular displays. The way Nintendo actually implements this technology is what we call the parallax barrier, and a parallax barrier is kind of neat. Yes, okay, So the screen that you're looking at, the three D screen, is an l c D screen.
On top of that screen is a second l c D screen that uses these little liquid crystals to create kind of like shutters, and the shutters block off the way light bounces or projects off of the back lit uh three D screen, And by shuttering off the light just right, it directs light in two particular directions, the left eye and the right eye. So it's blocking the right eye's image to the left eye and it's blocking
the left eye's image to the right eye. Now, if you, uh, if you haven't been following us on Facebook, and if not, why haven't you? Um, you probably are unaware of what we are about to get into. Actually, I was going to bring up next, which is that when I wasn't here one day, they took it upon themselves to tear this thing apart. If you want, I'll give it to you. It's in a bag. Thanks. Most bits in a bag. We can eBay that the chunks of it. I had
to throw away some of the pieces they were Yeah. So, so could you actually pull these screens apart? Can you actually see this for yourself? Well, because it's liquid crystal display, No, you're not gonna I mean, I wouldn't recommend it. Um, first of all, you can avoid your warranty, and second of all, you're gonna break your three D s Uh. If I had a heat gun, I could have weakened the adhesive enough to pull apart the screens. But I didn't have a heat gun, so I didn't bother to
try and force that. UM. I took the I took the protective covering off of the three D screen so that you could see where the speakers are mounted. The speakers are mounted on the three D screen, not on the base. UM you can see where the forward facing camera was. Uh, that kind of stuff. But you could not. I couldn't pull out the screen and then uh split in twain, but uh, yeah it was. It's It's interesting that the little UM three D switch on the left on the right rather of the screen, if you put
it all the way down, it turns the three d off. Well, if you start sliding it up, it actually adjusts the three D and the way it adjust the three D is the width of the little crystal shutters. By by sliding it up, it adjusts the width so that you get more or less light coming to you from the various screens, and it will actually offset the pictures a little bit more too, which means that you can adjust
the depth of field. And the reason for that is that, you know, we were talking about how these displays kind of mimic how our eyes are are spaced on our heads. Well, most of the time, you have to estimate that, right, Sure, you base it on an average, so you see, the average person's eyes are so so many centimeters apart, and if your device doesn't have any way of adjusting for that,
you just have to go for the average. And you realize that any individual person who views that is going to have a variable experience based upon how far apart their actual eyes are. So let's say that the average is a certain amount, and that my eyes happened to be a little closer together than average. That means that if I'm looking at a fixed parallax display, like there's no way to adjust that three D I'm not going to get as good an experience as someone who whose
eyes are closer to the average. Well, this, this little switch allows you to change the offset of those images and the width of those uh those crystals to be able to uh to get it closer to what your your your physiological makeup is, so you can get as close to an ideal experience as possible. All that being said, after about ten minutes of playing with this on three D mode, I started to feel a little uh se sick, which is weird because I don't get motion sickness easily.
I'm like a roller coaster fanatic, and I ride like the happy Go Pukis. I don't have any problem with any of that. But after playing with this thing for ten minutes, I was thinking out, feel so good? Well, and uh we did have other people comment on Facebook that they don't have that problem. Yeah, exactly. Most of the people I lent it out to had a similar response of Wow, this is making me, this is making
my head hurt, It's making me a little dizzy. Um. Now, that might be that they just had not tweaked the three D setting properly so that it wasn't ideal, you know, because again, if it's set a little off to you, then it's just you may not be able to consciously put your finger on what's wrong, but you'll start to feel a little, you know, wonky. Yeah, so let's talk a little bit more about some of the other elements.
Since we talked about breaking this thing open and looking at it, I was going to talk a little bit about some of the stuff that's in it. And as an arm processor, as the CPU, uh, and it's uh between five mega hurts to a giga hurts and processor speed. Uh. You don't really need a super fast processor to play most of the games. And of course, the higher the speed of the processor, the more heat it's going to generate.
And heat in general is bad, especially for a handheld device, because you don't really have the space to put in a cooling system like a fan or event or something, so you don't want to generate a lot of heat. So because of that, there's not just the CPU. There's also a graphics processing unit. We do know more about that. Yeah, it's made by digital media professionals and it's the PEAKA two hundred chip and um it's ay. It runs at
a four hundred mega hurts. So you've got a dedicated chip for the graphics, you've got another chip that's kind of running the rest of the horsepower for the games. And then there's other chips in there too, right, There's like there's a gyroscope, there's an accelerometer. Um, there's there's of course memory chips, both for the RAM and for actual storage memory. It comes to going gig of flash memory on board. And then you also get a two gigabye UH SD card that comes with us, a Toshiba
SD card, and uh. The nice thing about is that, of course you can save content to this SD card. There's some limitations to that as well. Let's say that you save a game to the SD card and then you you load it onto a new three D S and then you try and go back to your old three D S and run that you're not gonna be able to access that content because it's it's d r M. The basis of that is that they don't want you to be able to start copying games and then distribute
them to all your friends. What about saved games? To save games I think are a little different, um, but I mean your your progress and things you could play if you had the game on another d S, you could play where you left off. I would have I think, So, yeah,
this is really for games. Like let's say you download a game because you can't as a good point, we didn't talk about you can download games from Nintendo service, and uh, if you were to save it to your SD card just so you don't take up all your space on your actual device, then you could port it over to a different three D S, but then you're not gonna be able to play it on your first one. Okay, same thing like if you were to port it over to a third D S, you wouldn't be able to
play it on the first two. And that that's just protecting Nintendo so that you don't end up, you know, distributing a game ad infinitum to all of your friends. Um, but there, I mean, there's also a Wi Fi chip in it. That's what allows you, of course to access not just WiFi hotspots, but Nintendo hot spots, which are few and far between here in the States, but they're pretty big in Japan. Um. There's also an i R chip so infrared that allows you to do probably three
DS to three D S communication. Although that not a whole lot has been said about that particular feature. Yeah, but it wouldn't surprise me if that capability isn't available, because it's already available on other Nintendo handheld. Well. Yeah, and there there's definitely there's definitely some some collaborative uh technology there. Right, there are ways where you can you can gain content just by encountering other people who happened to have a three D S Really, yeah, it's kind
of cool. The idea here is that you you keep the three DS on in sleep mode, and you carry it around with you, and when it comes within range, it's constantly sort of sending out a little signal, a ping sort of yeah, that's not going to kill your battery. Now, battery life for this thing, by the ways, around five hours, um, five hours of playtime that's on a full charge, um.
And that's if you have the brightness turn. The higher you turn up the brightness, the less time you'll have, right, because you need the electricity from the battery to power the brighter exactly. Yeah, you're you're putting in more lumens well you know when yeah, you make luminated so yeah, but yeah, it pings out this signal and if it if it finds another three d S, it can exchange information.
So let's say that you both are playing a game where you have tool pets, or perhaps you've created some means on your three D S. You know, those are the little avatar characters that Nintendo uses the Nintendo WE also, and I think they were introduced with the Nintendo we Yeah, or you could create an me using the three DS. Well, if you walk by a whole bunch of people holding three D s s, it may turn out that when you open up your little me plasa, you start seeing
these other means that other people have created. Because you know your three DS has made this connection and you downloaded, you ended up downloading automatically this information, which is kind of cool. It creates this sort of community experience, even with people you've never met. Although it makes you wonder if you can make your me a real jerk face so that you're me whenever you go into the meat plazas is really harassing the other means? Why does it
not surprise me that you've considered this as a possibility. Well, you know, I will say that there's a kind of cool feature where you can use the forward facing camera on the three DS to take a picture of yourself, and then the three D S will design a ME based upon that photo. That's very cool. Yeah, it'll it'll get it as close you know, trying. There's only so many preset features that the ME has at its disposal.
It's not that many, but it will try and pick the ones most appropriate to your faces, shape and features. M Well, you can I actually take three D photos in general, yeah, on the three D S. Yeah, the the forward facing cameras and is just a regular camera, but the rear facing cameras, those two that Chris was talking about before, those can take three D images. It takes two sets of photos and then overlays them and then you can get a little three D image and
it looks like you've got some real depth there. That actually is really cool. The downside of that, of course, is that the only thing you can view that on is the Nintendo three D S. Yeah, it's not like you could pop the SD card out and put it into a digital frame and something. You have all these three D photos because of the digital frame lacks the parallax barrier. So without the parallax barrier, you just get a two dimensional image. I'm sorry, that just sounds like
a major science fiction construct. Pretty sure Admiral Akbar had to reach the Parallax Barrier in order to destroy the Death Star in Return of the Jedi. Okay, he was mon Calamari. Well, so I'm sorry, I just kind of got me. Um See, it's a little on the expensive side, which is more expensive than the we now, right, and it's a hundred dollars more than what you're gonna find
with the regular DS models. Uh and with a feature like three D is its main big feature over the other DS models, right, And they're gonna be games that are gonna be designed just for the three DS that will not run on the d S or d S light. Not all of those games are in three D, by the way, some of the games that are coming out, well, by the time this podcast goes live, they may already
be out. But like the New Street Fighter game for the three D S is not in three D. It's for the three D S, but it does not have a three D mode. That's kind of cheesed off some people, by the way, I was gonna say, I imagine it will confuse some people who are expecting a three D s only title to be three D. Yeah, but as the case, the case is just that not avery title is gonna take advantage of the three D capabilities. Um. One thing it does do that's kind of cool that
the other DS games don't do. It has augmented reality abilities. Ah. Yes, Now, for the uninitiated, augmented reality is uh basically taking a
an image of something that's in real life. Say you're looking through a camera at a a building that is in front of you, and uh, and an augmented reality solution would lay a virtual layer of information over that to tell you maybe who the tenants inside the building are, or the address a building you're looking at right right, or you know, the things that are down the streets. Say you shift the camera and it says, oh, well, down the street you have a bookstore and a coffee shop.
And if you turn the camera the other way, it might say, you know, there's a restaurant here, and then it might even have a review of the restaurant up or perhaps the menu of the restaurant. And yeah, there's a lot of cool applications. You see this a lot with smartphones right now, because smartphones have more and more features that allow this to happen, like GPS, the compass, the camera. All of these elements give smartphones the capabilities
they need in order to overlay information on top of reality. Well, the three DS also has this capability, although it's in a very specific feature right now. When you get a three DS, you'll get a series of cards with it. Most of the cards have characters on them like Mario UH, sam Us from UH from was It Metroid Yeah, and Link from the Zelda series. I find this ironic because Nintendo started as a playing card company long long years
before electronics. Well, the one of the cards is one of the the infamous coin boxes, the question mark boxes that you find in the old Super Mario Brothers game and then in lots of Mario games since then. If you put that down on a table and you activate the Augmented Reality Games feature on your Nintendo three D S, pointing the cameras at that that UH card will start a scanning process. They will detect the presence of that card.
Based upon the image, they can detect what angle the you're holding the three DS, like, what's what angle of view you have? You hold it about fourteen inches away from that card and then it'll start this augmented reality feature where a three D virtual box coin box pops up and it appears to be standing on top of
the actual real card that's on the table. Now, granted, if you're just looking at the table as a third person, you know, observer, you're just gonna see a person pointing a three D S at a card, right, because the object is not the little virtual avatar guy is not really there. But if you're looking through the three D S, there appears to be a three dimensional animated objects standing
on top of the card. And then you can initiate various games playing UH and play with this this card, the first one being an archery game where you actually have to physically move around the table in order to get a view at all the different targets that you have to shoot at, which is pretty cool people. It was a big hit here at the office. People thought it was really a neat idea. Yeah, and I thought that the augmented reality UH applications really had a lot
of promise to them. It's still kind of limited because it was relying on this this card and if you if you lost the card, then you could always go to a Nintendo's site and actually, um, download an image that you could print on a color printer and then you could use that instead. UM. But you know, it's not like you could point the three D S at anything and then create a game on top of it. It's you know, these very narrowly defined parameters that that
it will work with. And that's pretty much the state of the art or augmented reality right now. UM. Anything that's relying on object recognition is pretty fairly primitive right now. So you're usually working with some sort of UM, predefined pattern, and the cameras are able to map the pattern and uh and generate the proper virtual data on top of the the physical appearance. It's UM that part I thought was really neat. I'm not sure that again this one.
It was this one game that came with than into no three D S. I don't know how many more applications will see of that. I don't I assume that there's nothing stopping a developer from creating other augmented reality games.
I would imagine that would be entirely possible, And personally, what I think would be really cool is create a tabletop map, all right, and then invite a whole bunch of people over and each person has their own three d S and they all point the three D s at the map, and the three DS is, because of their WiFi capability, can be network so you network together and then you play a role playing game on top of a real map with your virtual characters and they
can interact with each other. That would be very cool. That would be super cool. Can you imagine, Like I'm going back to my D and D game gaming days, but I could. I mentioned playing a D and D game where you're looking at a virtual representation of your you know, barbarian uh who is going to kick down the next door and you know the wizards right behind you with a spell and he cast magic missile at
the darkness for damage. Right, So, um, I didn't make my saving throw against dorkiness unfortunately, But yeah, I mean that that would be a really neat feature. Now are we going to see that? I don't know. I honestly don't know if people are going to try and develop for the augmented reality features of the three DS, but I would love to see that happened, because well, the
three D gaming was cool. It disoriented me enough where I probably wouldn't want to play it very often, and since it's not integrated into the games necessarily, there's not much point in ever turning the three D on if it's going to disorient me. But if you were able to push that augmented reality feature, then I'm saying, Hey, this is a really compelling new form of gaming that I am genuinely interested in, because eventually we're gonna have the that um that Star Wars Chess set where you
let the Wookie win. Well, I have to say that um at the price point and it's it's at right now and with the features, you know, I'm just not willing to fork over the money for it. But but quite a few people did. It sold pretty well it's first week. Yeah, I'm curious to see how those sales hold up over time. I you know, we don't do reviews here on tech stuff, but I have to completely
agree with you, Pulett. It's it's a really cool device and I see a lot of promise in it, but I don't I'm not I don't feel a need to buy one. Now that being said, I should also add that I am not really a handheld gaming enthusiast in the first place, So I'm probably not the right market. I when I game, I like to be sitting in a comfortable chair at home, controller in hand, looking at a big screen. So I'm not the right audience, so it's probably not fair to ask me. But yeah, I would,
I would skip it. Yeah, but still it's phenomenal technology. Yeah yeah, and there's nothing else. Uh, nobody else has got a version of that. In fact, Sony as of the week we're recording this, Sony pulled the PSP go off the market. Yes, the PSP go is no go, no mo wells just continue anyway. Yeah, so yeah, it's it's sort of an a league of its own right now. Um, yeah, exactly. Yeah.
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