But the real threat, as Nintendo of America's own president has admitted, is not the traditional gaming console manufacturers. It's Apple.

A handful of games originally made famous by Nintendo, such as Tetris and Megaman, have iOS apps that have done quite well. Few doubt that the company could make serious money from iOS versions of classics like Super Mario Bros, but so far they've refused to do it.

Mobile Gaming is Huge, But iOS is a Risky Move For Nintendo

It's a tough decision for Nintendo. The video game company has traditionally used its popular game titles like Super Mario Bros and the Legend of Zelda to help fuel demand for its own hardware, such as the Wii and handheld 3DS. Those characters haven't even shown up on competing consoles , which gives Nintendo a unique advantage over systems that often have superior graphics and more robust features. Suddenly making those beloved games available on iPads and iPhones runs the risk of cannibalizing the company's core business.

Indeed, their latest handheld gaming system, the Nintendo 3DS, was met with lackluster sales when it launched, despite the fact that its first console to include 3D graphics that don't require special glasses. The company slashed the price of the 3DS significantly, which improved sales somewhat.

But is the dedicated handheld gaming device inherently doomed? Serious gamers and hardcore Nintendo fans can probably be counted on to keep snatching up devices the company releases, but general consumers increasingly use their smartphones to play video games, and most people probably don't want to carry around a second device just for games.

It's not just Apple that's moving in on this space. Android is growing rapidly as well, and the forthcoming Kindle Fire tablet will have access to Amazon's own Android app store, videogames and all.

Features like the ability to stream movies and TV shows via Hulu and Netflix are certainly nice additions to video game systems, but it may not be enough to minimize the damage done by the growing smartphone and tablet markets. After all, those devices already have Netflix and Hulu, plus countless other content sources, not to mention hundreds of thousands of other mobile apps.

Photo by William Warby.

In 2010, the mobile entertainment industry was a $33 billion industry, according to research from Juniper in March 2011. It is expected to be a $54 billion industry by 2015. Gaming now takes up a great portion of people's time on mobile devices. In part, that is due to the rise of the "female gamer" according to research in a new infographic from the folks at smartphone niche site Geekaphone. Females make up 53% of the mobile gaming market. Angry Birds, in all its various incantations, has been downloaded 140 million times and 58% of app developers are making games for multiple mobile platforms. Check out the infographic below for some interesting details on the state of the mobile entertainment industry and gaming.

Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello recently told according to tech blog Tuaw that its biggest growing platform is the iPad.

"Consoles used to be 80% of the industry as recently as 2000. Consoles today are 40% of the game industry, so what do we really have? We have a new hardware platform and we're putting out software every 90 days. Our fastest growing platform is the iPad right now and that didn't exist 18 months ago."

Take a look at the infographic and let us know what you think.

The 3DeeFriends app lets you view your Facebook photo albums and those belonging to your Facebook friends in 3D. Photos can be viewed either as an anaglyph, interlaced, side by side, or as a cross over 3D image.

2. 3DeeVUsion

3DVUsion is an application that lets you turn your own photos saved in the iPhone's photo library into 3D images. With the app, you can select a pair of images from the library for viewing.

3. 3Dee!oader

With 3Dee!oader, you can both manage your Flickr photos and view them in 3D. You can load images side-by-side and convert them on-the-fly to anaglyphs. You're also able to search, view, and manage your Flickr account from your iPhone and save Flickr photos for later viewing.

4. 3DeeCamera

The 3DeeCamera application lets you create 3D images using your built-in iPhone camera. You can take two side-by-side photos or choose two stereo-pairs from storage to create the 3D images by shifting, rotating, and scaling the image pairs.

5. Hunter 3Dee

Hunter 3Dee is a top-down space shooter iPhone game. It offers two zones and six levels of play, all of which are in 3D.

Bonus: Coming Soon - Carnival Craze

Canadian kids' broadcaster Family Channel, the Sheridan Visualization Design Institute, and Spatial View Inc. collaborated, through an Ontario Centres of Excellence OCE project, to create a glasses-free 3D mini game called Carnival Craze. The game is aimed at kids ages eight through fourteen. The application is currently undergoing the iTunes App Store approval process.

The concepts behind alternate reality (or augmented reality) interactive gaming are futuristic in themselves. Gamers are freed from their PCs and permitted to roam the face of the earth like normal, social human beings while remaining in-game. Adding mobile and social aspects to the mix pushes the oeuvre into mind-blowing territory. Adventures are location- and proximity-based, IRL interactions spring from in-game teamwork: The mind reels. And don't let's get started on revenue streams, which will occur to you at a rate of one every half minute from the time you read this post until well into next week.

Stump has likewise given his notice to Digg and will apparently be couch-surfing his way across Europe through July.

Once the wunderkind duo have settled back down, Crash Corp's work will begin in earnest. Although the team is currently operating in super-stealthy hush-hush mode, we've been frieNDA'd enough to whet our excitement and can't wait to see what the startup will bring.

According to interactive game developer Brooke Thompson, whose site we now quote because its definition of the term most closely approximates what we've heard from the Crash Corp team, "Alternate reality gaming is a growing genre of pervasive games in which participants interact with an imaginary world within a real world space, uncovering a story through multiple means of communication and media. The games tend to be highly collaborative which make them excellent alternatives for team building exercises, viral marketing events, and promotional entertainment."

A mild example of a mobile augmented reality game would be the award-winning Ghostwire, which adds a basic overlay of a "ghost" into the environment as seen from a mobile device's camera:

Other examples of the tech can be seen in this Games Al Fresco post on augmented reality for mobile.

Of course, the better the tech gets, the more imaginative and exciting gaming possibilities become. From the afore-referenced Wikipedia article, "Advanced research includes the use of motion-tracking data, fiducial markers recognition using machine vision, and the construction of controlled environments containing any number of sensors and actuators."

In a word, the Crash Corp team are ignoring the fine line that separates technological realities from science fiction, and we applaud their ambition and wish them the best success.