And then there was the time travel arcade game (also by Sega) that used a kind of Pepper's Ghost effect to give the appearance of 3D without glasses. That was in the early 90s.
I think the idea of 3D displays keeps resurfacing because there's always a chance that the tech has caught up to people's dreams, and VR displays sure have brought the latency down a lot but even the lightest headsets are still pretty uncomfortable after extended use. Maybe in another few generations... but it will still feel limiting until we have holodeck-style environments IMO.
Yes I believe you are right in that the tech is catching up with concepts that seemed futuristic in the past. For example the hardware today supports much more than it would have been able to do, say, 5-10 years ago.
Our hypothesis is that the current solutions out there still require the consumer to buy something, wear something, install something etc. - while we want to build something that becomes instantly accessible across billions of devices without any friction for the actual consumer.
Maybe VR doesn't need that many games because the small handful of good ones have so much depth and replay value. I guess I just talked myself into a $700 VR kit and possibly a $700 GPU upgrade, depending on whether or not my RTX 3060 is up to task.
Fully agreed that if you want 100% full 6DOF immersion - go and pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars to wear a heavy and cumbersome headset on your head. We're not disputing that or thinking of competing with that.
What we're saying is that there may be a much larger market consisting of people who are not ready to commit to pay so much money to wear something that will give them motion sickness after 10 minutes.
If you're developing a VR game your market consists of 50 million people around the world who owns a VR headset. That's great. But since you already built the VR world in 3D, you could also open up the market to billions of people who want to play your game but on their own devices.
Admittedly, it won't be the same experience, but it could be a "midpoint". Not everyone can afford and is willing to pay for a VR headset.
Presumably developers could have combined this with parallax head tracking for an even stronger effect when you move your head (or the console), but as far as I know no one did.
1. Each eye sees the object from a different angle.
2. Both eyes see the object from a different angle when the object is moved relative to your head.
The 3DS does only #1. TFA does only #2. Presumably if you did both, you could get a much stronger effect.
I think the New 3DS had the hardware to do both in theory, but it probably would have made development and backwards compatibility overly complicated!
What we're thinking is to enable this technology - as long as there is a camera and a screen - instantly accessible across billions of devices.
That means that the 3D effect would be applicable not only for games built for that specific console - but for any and all games that are already in a 3D environment.
I'd say I'm not the only one who misses this technology in games, because a used New 3DS XL costs at least $200 on eBay right now, which is more than what I paid new.
I always thought 3D would combine really nicely with a ray traced graphics full of bright colors and reflections, similar to all those ray tracing demos with dozens of glossy marbles.