‘Nintendo ON’: A glimpse of augmented reality ten years ahead of its time

Before the Nintendo Wii came out in November 2016, there was much hype as to what Nintendo’s mysterious console was going to bring to the world. It was nicknamed the ‘Revolution’ before it adopted its significantly more people-centric title, the word Wii physically representing two i’s as two people playing in front of a device (and also, more obviously, as a homonym for “we”). With hype comes speculation and…a brilliant idea.

The video above shows the ‘Nintendo ON’, the gaming helmet of the future, from 2005. Skip ahead to the second half of the video and it shows you a futuristic adornment fit for technophilic motorcyclists. The helmet is fully equipped with vizors, surround sound, vaguely worded eye-tracking capabilities, and even a DVD drive for running your games with only a 30 second load time (“wow!”).

But the most interesting part, right near the end, is that the Nintendo ON had augmented reality capabilities. The video shows a player wearing the helmet and traversing the Metroid world, the walls of their house becoming part of the world itself. It also shows the player walking around the Princess Peach’s castle as an elongated version of Mario. The video I’ve posted was the best I could find, but from memory there was actually a longer version that showed different objects in your house becoming in-game objects, like chairs becoming Mario coin blocks.

For a world just about to graduate from the GameCube and Playstation 2 as the pinnacles of gaming devices, this was a mind-blowing concept, one that would make any kid feel awe, sparkles twinkling in their eyes. But what happened to Nintendo ON? How come no-one has seen one?

The answer is that Nintendo ON never existed. This was a fake video released shortly before the Wii’s announcement at the Electronic Entertainment Expo of 2005. The device was a complete sham, posted as a “leaked Revolution trailer” by a man named Pablo Belmonte from Spain. Possibly one of the most exciting products ever made, but alas, it was not to be.

However, the hope has returned in 2016. Not necessarily in the form of an Nintendo console (although who truly knows what the Nintendo NX has in store?), but in the context of recent years’ augmented reality devices. The development version of the Microsoft Hololens can already be ordered in the US and Canada.

Meta 2 appears equally if not more impressive. It has a development kit out too.

The mysterious Magic Leap, however, probably has the most impressive display of them all, if demonstrations of its tech are to be believed. Its release is simply slated to be “hopefully soonish”. Many of their demos put great emphasis on the fact that no special effects were added to the video.

So, the Nintendo ON — despite being a fake product introduced a decade ago — is now available as a real thing, to some degree. There’s some big questions to be addressed: how do you provide infinite walking space in a fantasy world when the physical world limits your movement (the answer may be in perceptual illusions or bowls for walking in)? How do you provide an accurate enough perception of objects so as to transform them into equivalent virtual objects? (Vuforia provides an SDK that might help developers do so to some degree right now.) Both virtual and augmented reality are slated to become gigantic industries in oncoming years, so there are huge amounts of time and resources available for those questions to be answered.

We live in exciting times. Augmented reality and Nintendo ON’s glimpse 10 years ahead of its time does beg the question, however…what hoax of today will become the reality of tomorrow?