It’s a DS with slightly larger screens and two cameras. At first I thought it was a joke but then I’d only heard about the exterior camera and not the one that’s on the inside. With a camera on the inside it makes sense.
The consumer is going to want to know what the camera is for other than taking pictures. The reason why the Nintendo stocks fell after this announcement though is probably a bit because of the analysts lack of imagination, the avalanche effect: as soon as stocks fall, other analysts are going to make the assessment to sell stocks in Nintendo as well. It’s all just pure speculation, and it’s a bit bizarre considering Nintendo is a great success-story and is selling copious amounts of their hardware.
But anyways, the consumer is going to want to know what the camera is for other than taking pictures and so is the analysts :)
We all want to know that. For me, it was pretty inevitable that Nintendo were going to release a handheld with a camera built into it, and I even wrote about this in an article in spring. Although I thought it would happen later on with the release of their next gen handheld, so that you’d get the accelerometer, the 2 touch-screens instead of one, and the multi-touch as well.
A camera pointed at the user is great for a lot of features in games, and obviously it would be great for some kind of Eyetoy-esque gaming experience (although in Nintendo land that’s probably WarioWare). Features that come to mind is having the handheld recognise facial expressions and incorporating such features into games such as Nintendogs, so that you encouraged your virtual dog simply by smiling at it. It would also be pretty neat if the camera were capable of reading your eye movement, then you could really talk about new ways of playing 1st person shooter games. It’s a bit sad maybe that they didn’t choose to have all the camera features on the inside, or one great camera vs. two mediocre, although it’s understandable, considering it broadens the possibilities of what you can do gameplay wise, and it also makes for a more convenient way to quickly take a snapshot. What I’m hoping for is also that the camera on the inside might be able to make it possible to have Wii-like experiences on the DS as well. If you take the ps3’s eyetoy, that camera is actually possible to apprehend spatial movement much like the Wii’s sensor bar. And I was thinking about that, but maybe a simple camera like the ones on the DSi in combination with the poor DSi hardware isn’t able to grasp spatial movement from a simple lens, the thing that a lot of people point at though is that you need to have preferably 3 sources that register movement, and that aren’t aligned to be able to perceive spatial movement in the best way. Well… the DSi with its clamshell design opens up for the possibility to have three sources that aren’t aligned. And so maybe the actual camera (the same one that’s on the DSi prototype unit right now) in combination with some kind of sensor bar, or two sensor cameras at the “lower, interior part” of the clamshell could do the trick. Then you’d be able to use s stylus with IR light and paint in 3D or play a virtual trombone, or.. grasp!.. play some kind of innovative 3D game!
And since the DSi is featuring a faster Wifi connection maybe users will be able to camera chat with each other on some games.
What I don’t like with their presentation of the DSi though is that they only showed a paint program that could distort photos you took with the camera, or add things such as mustaches to peoples faces, much like the software that is bundled with most webcameras these days.
They didn’t really have a great game that could persuade people that the cameras are the way to go. In many ways, this probably goes in line with what Iwata told the press at the unveiling, that the idea behind the DSi was to broaden the usability of the game device so that people took it with them wherever they went.. a pretty loft goal for a bulky machine such as the DS (sure, the DSi is lighter, but it’s still about the same size).
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