I Am Stereoblind, But the 3DS Lets Me See the World as Others See Ithttp://kotaku.com/i-am-stereoblind-but-the-3ds-lets-me-see-the-world-as-484508038George Kokoris is a senior designer at Rare Ltd. He's an ex-cinematographer, a graduate of Full Sail University, and a former member of Microsoft Studios' college hire program.
I cried the first time I held a Nintendo 3DS. The experience was a revelation that I'll not soon forget, and even if everyone stopped making games for it tomorrow, my blue 3DS XL is not going anywhere. That little machine is a window into a part of human experience that most people take for granted, but which is otherwise inaccessible to me.
After playing with the depth slider off for a few minutes, I slid it up out of sheer curiosity and saw something I had never seen in my life: a third dimension.
This is how other people see the world all the time.
Not only was I "seeing into the screen" the way so many others feel when playing a 3DS for the first time, I was seeing in a direction that had previously been literally invisible to me.
As silly as it may seem to get an existential epiphany out of a $200 plastic gadget, the apparent solidity of the tiny simulacra on that screen made them seem almost more "real" than the world around me, which looked suddenly flat by comparison. It didn't matter that they had three-digit polygon counts and textures that must have topped out at 512x512. I had never before perceived things as having volume, only a sort of surface area in terms of how much of my vision they took up. It was intoxicating. It was a glimpse into something that I immediately realized was part of everyone else's normal experience. This is how other people see the world all the time. There's nothing magical about the perception of depth.
Yet there I was, holding this little chunk of plastic and silicon in my hands, tears streaming down my face because I had never known it was possible for reality to look this way—for things to look as solid as they feel. I couldn't look away.