Possibly no 3-D in next Nintendo home console

The Nintendo 3DS hit North American store shelves on March 27, the Kyoto, Japan-based corporation’s latest hand-held game system featuring glasses-free 3-D technology. Nintendo may be looking elsewhere, other than 3-D technology, for another innovation to feature in its next home gaming console.

In a recent interview with CNN, Nintendo hinted that 3-D technology would unlikely be in its next-generation of home hardware to replace the current Nintendo Wii console.

“Glasses-free is a big deal,” president of Nintendo of America Reggie Fils-Aime told CNN. “We’ve not said publicly what the next thing for us will be in the home console space, but based on what we’ve learned on 3-D, likely, that won’t be it.”

Nintendo executives told CNN that the company has learned from its research over the past few decades that 3-D and glasses together are a losing formula. Nintendo pointed out that’s what TV makers and rival game companies such as Sony Computer Entertainment are learning.

“I think at Nintendo, we realize that any sort of goggle-type 3-D technology was not going to work,” Hideki Konno told CNN, who has directed or produced some of Nintendo’s most-beloved franchises and a key person for the 3DS’s development. “In order to make 3-D technology viable with video games, we thought we needed to have glasses-free 3-D.”

Glasses-free 3-D TV technology is still years down the road. Samsung recently said working, reliable glasses-free 3-D TVs are a whole decade away.