One of the best showcases for the technology was an ‘alternate reality’ game called Target Shooting. This game makes excellent use of the 3DS’s features in ways I haven’t seen before. Here’s how it works: you point the 3DS’s out-facing camera so that it can see a printed Question Mark block (from Mario) placed on a table in front of you (in the real world), which you can see on the Nintendo 3DS’s top-screen. After a quick calibration process, that question mark block vanishes from the screen completely and becomes a virtual canvas on which the game is played. Now keep in mind that this “canvas” resides within the “real world”--that is, you can still see your physcial room outside the boundary of the virtual landscape, blurring the lines of fantasy and actuality.

At first, a tree and three targets popped up. To aim, you physically move the 3DS around in actual space to position the targets in the center of the screen, as if they were actually there. You can move the 3DS closer or further and even side-to-side--basically anything you need to do in order to get the targets on-screen. After I destroyed those three, the virtual landscape magically transformed before my eyes, causing a deep recession to appear in the ground. The game then instructed me to “look” into the hole. I then actually stood up and moved my 3DS directly over the hole (or in real life, the Question Mark block on the table) and found my final target, which I was then able to blast. Let me be frank: this blew my mind. Actually moving the 3DS around as if it were a window into another world really does feel out-of-this-world.

The demo concluded with a stone statue of a dragon coming to life, with its weakpoints covered in red. Most of them were easily shot, but the last few were located on its tail, which were almost  impossible to aim at while facing the dragon. In order to target them, I actually had to circle the table (in real life!) to attack it from behind, as well as avoid its lunge attacks which felt amazingly visceral. It looks like that dragon’s actually lunging at you! Pretty amazing stuff.

In short, this demo was magical. Sure, there wasn’t much to it, except for an insane amount of potential that I can only imagine some future 3DS game will fully realize. I don’t normally say things like this, but if you weren’t excited by the 3DS before, you should be.