The Louvre Replaces Old Boring Audio Tours With Nintendo 3DSes

Nintendo 3DS at the Louvre Nintendo

The Louvre Museum in Paris overhauled their digital tour guide system last week, replacing it with, surprisingly, a stock of Nintendo 3DS consoles. Now you can browse the Venus de Milo and the Mona Lisa in...3-D! Or in real life, I guess, since you're already in the museum. (The resolution's better in real life.)

The 3DS actually is a pretty decent device for getting around a huge museum--it has two screens, one of which is a resistive touchscreen and the other is a 3-D screen. You can have a map on one screen and audio tour options on the other, or a map and a list of the museum's most popular exhibits. Plus the 3DS has a locator--GPS can be tricky indoors, but the Louvre has a system of beacons placed around the museum for precise location, so you can always tell where you are and where you want to go.

I can't imagine the 3-D is all that useful--the demo video below shows a lot of flashy 3-D views of the exhibits in the museum, which doesn't make a ton of sense to me--but the two screens would actually work well in practice.

Or, if you get bored, you can find a bench and play a few rounds of Mario Kart 7 (not included at the museum, probably). The 3DS costs $6.50 to rent--for a few hours, anyway, until the battery craps out. Maybe in a few years we'll be able to replace them with Google Glasses?

[LA Times]