I keep meaning to respond to this post, but never do. Ikagura, my boy, let Professor Gorse answer your query:
Is there a slight possibility to have modern screens replicating the 3DS' 3D effect?
Short answer: Theoretically yes, in practice no. Long answer:
The 3DS used a very primitive, rudimentary form of 3D based around two screens. The “external” screen is the one you physically saw, on the face of the unit. The “internal” screen separated the external screen and the lit pixels. As light shined through the internal screen, it distorted the image, which was then “corrected” by the external screen before it hit your eye. The 3D slider was a physical, analog lift that moved the internal screen “up” and “down”, depending on adjustment.
This process was why 3DS games “went in” to the console instead of “came out”, and heavily limited horizontal field of view. Because the internal screen literally needs to move physically, the console needed a thick border at the top of the face, which was where it moved to when the 3D slider was adjusted.
Nintendo got away with this because the 3DS was a small handheld unit, but for a huge TV screen, it would be completely infeasible. The TV would need to be hideously oversized, with a huge top border, it would need several small, delicate parts to move perfectly in tandem with one another to control the “lift”, viewing angles would be horrible (you’d have to sit dead-on in front of the TV), and the price would go through the fucking roof because there would be two ultra-HD screens. I guess you could build a TV like this, but it would be ugly, expensive, and provide a very poor viewing experience.
The New 3DS attempted to “improve” this process by assisting the physical movement with software, rendering the picture twice on both screens and pairing it with the console’s accelerometer to simulate horizontal motion. This, in addition to providing a pathetically small increase in viewing angles (they used to cite hilarious figures like 15% better 3D), brutally murdered performance for advanced games, because the console literally has to play the game twice. This is why later Pokemon games halved FPS in 3D, and why the last batch of first-party games didn’t include 3D at all.
2010s-era 3DTVs used your glasses as the “external” screen and the TV display as the “internal” one, so you could move around and the illusion wouldn’t break. 3D movies project a distorted image which your glasses “decode” to give you the illusion. Retro 50s red/blue 3D literally uses a red filter and a blue filter overlaid visibly on a source image to give each of your eyes a different visual which your brain interprets as “popping out” of the comic/movie/TV show.
That Visual Arts class in university wasn’t a massive waste of money, I swear!
