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Wii follow-up "not likely" to feature 3D

Nintendo cool on tech for home console as company sticks to "glasses-free"

Nintendo appears to have ruled out including 3D technology in the home console follow-up to the Wii, because of the likely need for players to wear glasses to make it work.

The news follows the launch of the 3DS handheld, which Nintendo of America hailed as a record-breaker for day one sales - although reports in other regions seem to indicate a mixed reception, with no official figures having yet been publicly released.

But with one of the main selling points of that device being the "glasses-free" 3D, the company is reluctant to move away from that concept in other new hardware.

"I think at Nintendo, we realise that any sort of goggle-type 3D technology was not going to work," Hideki Konno told CNN. "In order to make 3D technology viable with video games, we thought we needed to have glasses-free 3D."

And Reggie Fils-Aime added: "Glasses-free is a big deal. 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 3D, likely, that won't be it."

Part of the problem for Nintendo is that while the company is able to pull together the entire user experience into one device on the 3DS, a home console implies the use of a TV - and while glasses-free 3D televisions are being worked on, they're unlikely to enter the market in an affordable way for some time to come.

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Phil Elliott

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