The Louvre Replaces Old Boring Audio Tours With Nintendo 3DSes

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