SAN FRANCISCO—U.S. analysts were intrigued and curious Wednesday (March 24), following the overnight release of a brief statement by Nintendo Co. Ltd. saying the company plans to launch within the next year a handheld video gaming system that offers 3-D effects without requiring the use of special glasses.

Nintendo (Kyoto, Japan) provided few details, leaving analysts to speculate on the technology that the company plans to employ.

"There are only a few technologies for autostereoscopic displays, which don't require special glasses. We suspect they are using one of those," said Chris Chinnock, principal of Insight Media.

According to Chinnock, there are currently no more than a dozen commercial products which use autostereoscopic 3-D displays, including a mobile handset from Hitachi which is available in Japan.

Pamela Tufegdzic, a consumer electronics analyst at market research iSuppli Corp., said she didn't know how Nintendo would implement autostereoscopic 3-D, but said it could have something to do with face-tracking technology, which can shift the perspective of the game's view with using a front facing video camera to capture where the player is looking portraying that 3-D effect.

"It could be something similar to motion sensing game play tracking your movements with sensors," Tufegdzic said.

Chinnock said all of the known autostereoscopic display technologies suffer from poor image quality for the most part, requiring tradeoffs in viewing angles and viewing zones. "That's okay in a handheld device because it's easy to move your head around the screen," Chinnock said.

But Chinnock acknowledged that using an autostereoscopic display for a gaming system could be problematic. "If it's a detail-oriented game, yes, it's going to be a problem. If it's more like icons and graphics that have larger scale, it may not be a problem."

Nintendo said the successor to its popular DS line of handheld gaming systems, which is temporarily being called 3DS, will include backward compatability so that DS games could be played on the system. The company promised to provide more details on the system at a video gaming conference in Los Angeles in June.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that Nintendo President Satoru Iwata told analysts in January that the company has been working on 3-D gaming technology for years and experimented with a 3-D feature for its GameCube console, the processor to Nintendo's Wii system.