How Nintendo beat Apple and the iPhone 7 to 3D cameras by four years - and for less than £150

Stereoscopy is nothing new - Mario's had it for ages...

Everyone's getting really excited because Apple's snapped up a few 3D imaging companies and may be putting a 3D camera into its next smartphone, the iPhone 7.

Whether that's just hit-grabbing journalism or genuine excitement, it amounts to the same thing for me: I don't understand why that's such a big deal: 3D photography's been around in tech for ages.

Dell put the technology in its recent Venue 8 7000 Android tablet and nobody really cared (it didn't work brilliantly anyway - I tried it myself and saw it estimate a man's height as 12 feet). But what's really fun to consider, when you just know that Apple will loudly trumpet this feature in its next £700 smartphone, is that an increasingly overlooked Japanese electronics company placed the same technology in a product over four years ago, and you can now buy it for under £150.

That company is games hardware and software maker Nintendo, and you've probably been ignoring the purveyor of Super Mario Brothers because its gadgets are all about bright colours, pocket monsters and bouncy mushrooms. Well, despite its continuing struggle to sell games and hardware, it's technologically savvier than many think.

The Nintendo 3DS has been cranking out 3D visuals - that don't require glasses, by the way - for both moving graphics and still photographs since February 2011, and in doing so has quietly and efficiently cracked a problem that television manufacturers, Dell, and many others seem no closer to figuring out. Namely, Nintendo has made 3D functional, reliable, cheap and effective.

It works in a delightfully Victorian way, by utilising simple stereoscopy - mimicking human eyes in terms of producing two different images, which are then layered to create the illusion of depth.

Nintendo's latest iteration of the 3DS, which launched earlier this year, even includes eye tracking via the machine's front camera to keep the images ‘spaced' apart appropriately and maintain the illusion if the device is moved in the hand.

Similarly, 3D photographs can be taken by way of the device's dual back cameras, which take two photos and merge them together to find the 'sweet spot', and suggest a convincing layer of depth.

The twist in Nintendo's thinking with 3D is that it's built entirely for a personal experience, which is where the TV market has fallen down. If the image is geared only to an individual user's view, the result is a blurred mess for everybody else.

But Nintendo cracked it by catering for the just a single user, but making the price of entry low enough to represent value. And I, for one, now spend many happy commutes diving headlong into immersive, 3D worlds while everyone else on the train mindlessly taps at Candy Crush.

I think my point with all this is two-fold: first, 3D photos are absolutely no big deal and have been around for ages - so please calm down. And, second, don't be afraid to look at the more entertainment-focused end of the consumer market to see what's coming next in technology.

From the Duck Hunt gun on the early Nintendo console to Microsoft's Kinect (which is now working its way into such areas as remotely-controlled medical operations), viable technology has often been tested out on the humble gamer before hitting its stride.

The buck doesn't all start with mainstream technology, and it definitely doesn't start with iPhone 7.