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Nintendo was the first games company to do 3D and the first to do augmented reality, but it looks highly unlikely it will be joining the virtual reality party.
Whether it was the new AR ventures of Microsoft’s Hololens or the blossoming VR movement driven by Oculus Rift and Steam VR (and to a lesser extent Project Morpheus), new technologies were all the talk of E3 2015.
Yet Nintendo remains conspicuous by its willingness to sit back and be left out of the party.
"We have knowledge of the technical space, and we’ve been experimenting with this for a long, long time," Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime told Polygon.
"What we believe is that, in order for this technology to move forward, you need to make it fun and you need to make it social. I haven’t walked the floor, so I can’t say in terms of what’s on the floor today, but at least based on what I’ve seen to date, it’s not fun, and it’s not social. It’s just tech."
In 1995 Nintendo broke new ground with the launch of the Virtual Boy. Despite the name, it wasn’t a VR headset, but it was the first to offer parallax 3D graphics. Then in 2011 the company pioneered again, integrating a number of AR games with its new 3DS handheld.
