LOS ANGELES — Tired from Nintendo's press event and rounds of interviews at the E3 videogame conference last week, Satoru Iwata wore an air of earned contentment.

Amid new motion-sensing game systems from Microsoft and Sony, and Apple stepping into the videogame market with the iPhone and iPad, Nintendo's chief executive managed to steal the show when he unveiled the Nintendo 3DS handheld game console.

Iwata sat down with Forbes at E3 to talk primarily about the 3DS, the successor to Nintendo's hugely successful DS line, which has sold more than 120 million units to date. The 3DS has added some new features: a 3.5-inch wide screen, two front cameras that can take 3-D photos, an accelerometer and gyroscope for motion-control game-play, and improved graphics processing and resolution.

But the biggest selling point of the 3DS is that it displays games in 3-D and doesn't require users to wear special glasses. Nintendo plans to integrate the 3-D capability to change the way games are played.

"People are going to be able to navigate more easily throughout the game world with 3-D," Iwata said. For example, playing the "Star Fox 64" space shooter title on the 3DS "you can more easily fly through the floating rings because you can more precisely comprehend the distance between you and the rings," he said.

The 3DS is not only able to display games in 3-D, but also movies. Nintendo showed off a few trailers of 3-D movies such as How To Train Your Dragon on the 3DS. Iwata said he's eager to partner with Hollywood studios to get movies onto its system.

While Nintendo announced a number of details about the 3DS, the launch date and price haven't been set yet. Iwata hinted, however, that these details will be announced soon, along with more 3DS features.

"Technologically speaking, a variety of different things are possible with the 3DS, for example, 3-D video chat," Iwata said.

Regarding a hardware refresh of the Wii home console, Iwata said Nintendo developers hadn't yet exhausted the game-play possibilities on the device yet. He pointed to the new "Legend of Zelda" game, in which the Wii controllers are swung about in real life and appear as a sword and shield within the game, as evidence of this.

Said Iwata: "We have just introduced the new 'Legend of Zelda' to be launched in 2011, which shows that we are not in a hurry to launch the next generation of home console."