Mr. Iwata did not, however, offer any suggestions of a shift in strategy and did not discuss any possible change to plans for the Wii U. Yet what Nintendo faces is a fundamental shift in game-playing habits that analysts argue may require it to shrink its hardware business and instead look for profits for Super Mario and other game titles on devices built by other companies.
To get the kind of volumes of data required to create serious value they're also looking to shrink their hardware right down — and stick it inside the phone.
But the idea itself is interesting, and if LazeeEye's makers can polish and shrink their hardware, optimise their algorithms and software, and deliver on their price pledge, they could put 3D mapping tech within reach of a lot more people — assuming they hit their rather ambitious Kickstarter goal and pull in the funding needed to pull all that off.
The company's chiplets are built around the kind of system-on-a-chip approach that you'll see in most modern devices, where everything is in a single unit that reduces some of the complexity of moving processes around a larger piece of hardware — shrinking the space constraints and allowing all these actions to happen on a device, such as a smartphone.
"Hardware is shrinking fast, but batteries are going so slowly," said Mr Karlsson.
The company is blaming the strong yen and rapidly shrinking 3DS sales (both hardware and games) for the bad numbers.
The enclosure was made using fabrication service Shapeways, though unfortunately it was necessary to emulate the hardware, as shrinking it wasn't an option.
Like a standard laptop, such a computer would become more powerful as the size of its hardware shrank and its software became more efficient that is, consumed less energy when manipulating a bit of information.
The overall defence budget expanded slightly this year, for the first time in 11 years, but the money Japan has available to spend on military hardware is nevertheless shrinking as equipment-maintenance costs rise.
Both bidders are betting that profits from their targets, which boast fat margins and multi-year contracts with customers, will offset shrinking returns from the increasingly commoditised hardware business.
