My eyes! Nintendo 3DS NOT suitable for children - or adults

Is it just me or am I seeing double? Playing the Nintendo 3DS
felt like trying to look at something stuck to my nose.

Allow me a geek moment. I have been interested in getting my hands on a Nintendo 3DS to test it out. For anybody that doesn't know what that is, it's basically the newest iteration of the Game Boy, but in a different stratosphere. Specifically, it features mind-bending, glasses-free 3D.

As a parent of two, I often look forward to video games when the kids drift off to sleep after hours of partying with each other in the backroom. It's something I can do quietly because the mute is almost always on when I play video games. However, sometimes I don't feel like having my 40" TV demanding my attention after the lights go out. So little screens are welcome at night.

However, Nintendo itself has warned that your eyeballs can have a bad hair day (let your imagination run wild with that mental image for a second) if you use the thing. When I got locked out of my house for three days while my wife was out of town with the keys, I was about to buy one of these $250 gadgets on an impulse, rationalizing that having a new toy would keep me out of trouble with the wife and kids out of town. But the only angelic voice I had in a sea of little red devils wanting a new gadget warned me I'd probably better try the thing out first.

I'm glad I did. I walked into Best Buy the other day and found a 9-year old child just finishing his tech demo with the shiny little blue device. Glad I didn't have to glare at him intimidatingly until he left it to me, I took it up and immediately felt my eyes go all wonky trying to read the 3D image on the top screen. It felt a little like crossing your eyes to look at a 3D dot art image, which were way cool in the early 90s, if I recall. I quickly found the depth slider on the right and adjusted it to where my eyes weren't screaming about having to look in so many directions at once.

The 3D image is crisp, but even adjusting to the most comfortable depth, it doesn't feel quite right. And of course, it's just a trick to make your eyes see two images at once. Apparently, my brain grasped this better than my eyeballs, and I felt a headache coming on quickly. Worst of all, jumping down to look at data on the lower screen really throws the eyes for a loop. You literally feel your eyes "shift" to see the 2-dimensional data. Yes, you can turn the 3D off entirely, but isn't that why you just spent $250 bones on the thing?

Sadly, I came away unimpressed with a minor headache after testing the thing for 15 minutes. In fact, I was seeing double for the next few minutes after I got off. My eyes just couldn't track as fast after playing with the thing. The good news? I don't have to spend $250 in the next little while. If the toy makes my adult head swim through the deep end so easily, I'd rather not even risk my kids getting their hands on something like that when they don't even know how to swim. Which is precisely why Nintendo issued the vision warning about the 3D for children under 6.

Having been a DS owner already, I know the powerful pull the little gadget had on little hands and eyes. So I think I'll skip bringing this one into a house where my kids love coloring on the DS. I think my kid's eyes will thank me for it. I'm pretty sure they'd develop lazy eyes or something worse if I let them play with it. I was halfway there myself just testing it out.

Besides, I can think of lots less expensive ways to get a headache.

Anyone else had a similar experience with this thing?