Revision of the VR Nintendo Labo kit: The Switch makes virtual magic

The late entry of Nintendo into the world of virtual reality has finally arrived. Yes, it's cardboard. Yes it's weird. But the ideas inside are probably different from anything you've tried before.

It's impossible not to think about Google cardboard when creating the Nintendo Labo VR Kit Building Kit, what I did last week with my kids of 10 and 6 years old. Nintendo Labo is a series of fun and ingenious gaming art programming experiences designed for the Nintendo Switch, made entirely of cardboard, rubber and plastic eyelets.

In short, the VR Nintendo Labo kit took Google Cardboard and mixed it with the switch to create a complete cardboard universe.

Of course, Nintendo has remained at bay in the last three years, while Sony, Oculus, Google, Samsung, HTC and others have turned reality into reality. But society has always been dabble in immersive ideas. The 2006 Nintendo Wii was a pioneer of wild motion controllers, and its Nintendo 3DS 3D without glasses – and even AR. And hey, remember the virtual boy?

Since the Nintendo Switch is a convertible tablet that can be transformed into different forms, it allows Labo to be a sort of testing ground for the new involvement of the Switch. VR Lab represents the most practical experience that is: what happens if the switch is powering a VR headset? Of course VR Lab has its limits. But the concept makes sense, and most importantly, it works so well that Nintendo has enough understanding of the limits to design around them.

Nintendo has had a history of doing real magic in the past, including a magic kit with playing cards for the Nintendo DS a few years ago. Strangely, I realize now that this is exactly what the Labo VR kit is: a box of magic tricks filled with strange wonders.

Nintendo's $ 80 Labo VR kit is much more expensive than the almost free Google Cardboard, but it also makes six things: glasses, a camera, an elephant, a bird, a blaster and a pedal that creates the wind. A $ 40 kit including glasses and blaster is a good starting point if you are not ready to dive completely. You can buy the other pieces later in the form of $ 20 micropacks, adding the same overall cost.

So, what does it mean to bring VR together, to Nintendo? After spending days with my kids and myself building and playing with, I can say that it's mostly very bright. But it's also flawed, and yes, that involves a ton of cardboard folding, which has become really tedious. That's what happened.

We made a camera

After assembling the glasses, which took about 30 minutes to an hour, we made the camera (an extra hour) with a zoom lens. An underwater game allows me to look around, zoom in and take pictures of fish. My kids panicked and started screaming about sunfish, sharks and American football. It was not as scary for my 6 year old as some more realistic underwater virtual reality experiments on the Oculus Go he had already looked before. There is a second game that involves photographing a strange creature in a house (a reference to something that lived in a cardboard house in the first Labo kit), but we're not there yet.

We made a blaster gun

The blaster is a large cardboard bazooka in which you drop your safety glasses. It lets you look around and shoot pretty blob aliens in a multitude of levels based on rails. "It's like this Metroid game in NintendoLand," notes my 10-year-old. There is a lot of loading and firing (the cardboard chamber triggers loads and a button at the back release). It feels like an arcade game and the location sometimes gives me a little dizziness. I do not really like my kids doing things in games, but it passes the kids test to say the least.

We made a duck and a strange elephant

Other Labo VR accessories range from gadget to gloss. For example, the bird (which looks like a duck that lets you look into his buttocks?) Is cute, but it only flaps its wings. The game with which you use it looks like Pilotwings for birds: you fly over an island, feed the chicks and pick up objects. It is best in combination with the pedal, which blows the wind through its giant cardboard fan and creates a breeze when you slide.

The elephant, which has an elastic trunk, is ingenious. Reflective stickers on the "face", as well as an infrared camera on a Joy-Con controller, add a position controller tracking that allows you to reach and grab objects. This is similar to pieces of a kinetic puzzle game or 3D doodle with the help of an art app. Overall, the game looks like a lite version of Google's Tiltbrush VR application. Fortunately, the games know the limits of the controller and are arranged to make the most of the short "reach" of the elephant's arm.

What happens to all these cardboard things now?

One of the first things you have to face is that, with Labo, you produce a lot of cardboard novelty items that are somewhat fragile. Your children can break them and if they do not, you will need a lot of storage space or a large box to store them. And if they are tidy, will your kids forget them and do you really need more shit at home? Labo does not ask you to make sense of that. You are either for the tour or you are not. Sorry.

You can hack and create more, if you had the patience

There are many small Easter eggs buried in the Labo VR kit. A Discover section explains a little about the workings of virtual reality and optics, and a Toy-Con garage allows you to code like any other Labo kit (theoretically almost limitless if you can understand the confusing layout of the Garage menus) . Another DIY tool (Toy-Con Garage VR) allows you to reclassify or create new arcade mini-games to try. So there is a lot to do. Nintendo includes 64 quick mini-games to try. They can all be reformatted and redrawn. This could be the first introduction of a child to the design of basic VR games.

Limits? Of course

The switch has a low resolution screen of 720p, so that in reality, the pixels of the display are very large and slightly fuzzy. The battery life is quite short (less than 3 hours) and its controllers are not necessarily designed for virtual reality. Therefore, although they are wireless and have excellent haptic functions, they are sometimes awkward to use.

All Labo VR creations are designed to be used without any headband. You must therefore hold the thick, bulky and thick-plus-switch mask on your face, which becomes really tiring for more than 5 minutes, and the screen sometimes has a fair amount of delay, too. The Labo VR software encourages players to pause every few minutes, and I agree. Again, my children both played for a long time and wanted to continue.

The Switch uses its own gyroscope and motion sensors to allow rotation of the head (called 3DoF in VR circles), meaning it is forbidden to bend or move. This is good news because it limits the risk of injury and it is easier to sit or stand up. But movement commands sometimes have to be recalibrated, which requires you to switch the switch more recently. This is not ideal, and it's just another example of how the switch is not optimized for virtual reality.

Some of the commands of virtual reality can also become confused. The glasses have a superior typing area that allows you to double tap on the cardboard to select items, much like Google Cardboard did with its simple button. If you tap a small exposed portion of the screen near the nose, you can quit the apps, but it's not obvious. Joy-Con controllers need to be slipped into the elaborate Labo VR cardboard accessories, and their synchronization and removal becomes difficult. Patient parents and older children who like to tinker are the best choices for this.

Could this be Nintendo's first step in VR, with others coming?

I asked my eldest son, who had been working on Labo with me a year ago, to evaluate the experience with Labo VR. He said that he loved it, but he noticed that the pixels were "a bit too big". Maybe a new switch, offering smaller pixels and a new controller, could better take advantage of a full VR headset?

Curiously, I thought of the same thing. The Nintendo switch is 2 years old. A new version with a better display, processor and controllers could handle VR more convincingly. After all, the next Oculus Quest do just that in a stand-alone mobile gaming system.

Nintendo would like to pursue this idea? Perhaps. Super Mario Odyssey and Legend of Zelda: Breath of Nature are get additional updates that work with Labo VR. I have not played these features yet, but I would expect them to be quite limited (you also have to hold VR Lab in the face while you play, which is tiring) .

But the real question remains whether Labo VR is the sign that Nintendo is preparing for the next wave of VR equipment. The switch is not a perfect fit for virtual reality. It's a type of immersive experience that looks more like an innovative 3D glasses set than a totally immersive virtual reality experience. But it works well enough to pass. This shows that Nintendo's crazy ideas could apply to virtual reality games.

Again, it may be best to keep virtual reality as an experience, which is exactly what Labo VR is. Yes, it's a novelty, a weekend of folding and DIY with a few surprises. But we had a great time doing everything. My kids were amazed and loved every second (fighting over VR glasses, fascinated by games and worlds, and curious to find out more). It's after all that Nintendo always does better: being weird and fun. VR Lab is not perfect, and no, this is not your next VR killer helmet. But that gave me a weekend that I will remember forever. And I think that my children feel the same thing.