3DS Photography

This is my new passion. Beautiful 3D photos, taken on powerful, unstoppable hardware: the 3DS.

In light of both the ballooning trend I've seen on my personal Instagram feed for 2000s and 2010s digital cameras and my own enduring obsession with the marvel that is the 3DS, I took it upon myself this week to take a longer jaunt through the delights of this precious device's camera. 

It can't be denied that this thing looks like ass. It was, as far as I can remember, not considered a remotely impressive camera at the time of the 3DS's release - it was more of a fun gimmick feature that could either be used to straightforwardly entertain a child, or as an interaction point for the small selection of games that used it, like Face Raiders.

Very fun.

But nevertheless, there is a carefree joy to be had in taking it mildly seriously as a camera. At this point, digicams have become flashpoint nostalgia objects, their disgusting grain and horrible bloom and low-focus nastiness now a site of intrigue and hazy memory. The 3DS itself occupies this position, and I see about as many "check out my 3DS in 2026" short videos as I do digital camera videos. The tech from fifteen years ago is looking bright and delicious. If you're creative, there's always the threat of getting a nice picture out of some shoddy equipment.

Now, of course, you can take normal, static pictures on the 3DS in much the same way that you would on any digital camera, but you can also take yummy 3D photos and convert them from the 3DS's MPO format to a satisfying wiggly gif, as I have done for the pictures you see here via 3dswigglegram.com. These sorts of images (I think we usually called them stereographs at the time) were all the rage on late 2000s, early 2010s Tumblr. I remember M.I.A. posting them. There is now a subreddit for these, but they receded into the quiet of the internet as gifs and 3D both lost their allure.

It kind of astonishes me how far gifs have fallen out of favour online. Now they're primarily associated with reacting on WhatsApp, etc, choosing from the often uninspiring pool of Tenor or Giphy database options, and they've come to be essentially the same as the Minions wine memes littering Facebook. Just not something I envisaged, but it's hard to overstate just how much the shift into slick and specific format micro social media apps as the prominent way to post changed our aesthetic choices and communication styles. Gifs used to be cool, now they're thoughtlessly discarded.

But not for me. I am always thinking about the humble gif. And for that matter, I am a great lover of the 3DS's much maligned 3D. It doesn't always look great, and it's often implemented in a way that does nothing to add to the experience of playing a game, but sometimes it's amazing. I love it in the 3D Zelda remakes, and it's phenomenal in Red Viper, the 3DS's incredible fanmade Virtual Boy emulator. And surely, it goes without saying, it's pretty satisfying to take 3D pictures.

I settled on black and white with slightly upped contrast for these pictures because the look goes some way towards mitigating the low-quality gunk of even the camera's best shots. Making them look much more stylised was my way of working with the limitation for a more considered look. But their charm is in their crappiness. They are not glistening, perfectly posed and composed shots, but little memories. 

In that vein, there is something really delightful about a 3DS wigglegram's suggestion of dimension. Here's a homemade gif, the perfect diaristic moving image. I don't know... I think I'll be making many more of these.