What happened to the stereoscopic gaming revolution?
If you surveyed the video game industry just after E3 2010, you'd think stereoscopic 3D had finally reached a tipping point and was on the cusp of becoming a new gaming standard. Sony made everyone attending its E3 press conference that year wear 3D glasses to check out big-screen trailers for titles like Killzone 3 and Gran Turismo 5, Nintendo unleashed an army of booth babes at its own press conference to show off the glasses-free 3D of its Nintendo 3DS for the first time, and NVIDIA continued to push its all-in-one 3D Vision system, launched the year before.
Looking back today, it's hard to tell what all the fuss was about. While stereoscopic 3D is definitely present in today's gaming landscape, it has decidedly failed to become the revolutionary, must-have feature that seemed to warrant so much industry attention just a couple of years ago.
And industry leaders are beginning to acknowledge that fact. "I don’t think we’ll present [3D graphics] as one of the key features of our consoles but will probably stick with 3D as one of the minor elements of our consoles in the future," Nintendo President Satoru Iwata told The Independent recently in an interview about the upcoming 3DS XL.
