Introduce Your Child to Virtual Reality With Nintendo Labo VR
Nothing in the Labo VR Kit, Nintendo’s foray into virtual reality, should work. Compared to other VR systems, the frame rates are low and the graphics are crap. It’s so cheap it’s literally made of cardboard. There is no huge, exciting world to get lost in. There is not even a strap to attach it to your face. But Nintendo challenged the traditional logic of video games and created one of the most interesting, useful, and fun virtual reality apps I’ve ever seen.
Rather than figuring out how to immerse players deeper into often alienated and lonely digital spaces, Nintendo has reimagined the concept of virtual reality with Labo. This set of colorful minigames and creative cardboard designs encourages creativity, exploration, self-expression, and social play in the real world instead of sagging digital flavor. It’s virtual reality, but it’s not exactly fun. It’s really fun.
Like the best toys, Labo expands with your child’s interests in mind. If they just want to chill out in a fun little VR game, Labo offers dozens. If they are passionate about art, they can turn their designs into cardboard masterpieces. If your child enjoys working with his hands, he will love the process of assembling toys, and Labo provides tons of tools and instructions for young programmers to create their own games and toys.
Do things
The idea of Labo is for you and your child to create motion-controlled cardboard toys for use in specialized little games. The VR Kit adds a new dimension (literally) to the Labo library, with a collection of six new projects and many, many VR minigames that come with them.
With a little effort and a few folds and folds, you and your child will transform a few sheets of cardboard and some rubber bands into a majestic bird with flapping wings, a camera with a working focus ring, a space blaster that looks like a bazooka, and more cool toys.
We’ve built all of the Labo VR projects currently available: VR glasses, camera, elephant, blaster, wind pedal and turntable. Their complexity ranges from the relatively simple and fast construction of cardboard casing for virtual reality glasses to more complex designs such as a blaster. It took a couple of hours.
The instructions on the screen are clear and understandable. Switch lets you look at a project from any angle and repeat the steps as many times as you need to get it right. The assembly process is simple enough for most kids to understand (although smaller kids will probably need a little adult help) and it’s quite fun to put them together, although you might hear a few words “are n’t we done yet ?” when working on a toy, there are more time-consuming cons.
The finished toy cons are sturdy, durable and work exactly as advertised, and they often contain amazing detail: the ring on the camera lens snaps like a real one as you focus. The bird controller can be connected to the wind pedal and the turntable, allowing you to control the virtual bird in different ways.
Play games
After you’ve built your toy cheat, it’s time to test it out. Games for every project combine motion recognition and virtual reality into small, easy-to-learn games designed for quick testing and sharing.
While the enjoyment rate of each game varies, every title we’ve tried (and we’ve tried dozens) is reliable and playable, and many are amazing little bits of video game nirvana. None of the games included are grand, world-wide experiences, but in true Nintendo style, even the smallest rewards exploration with moments of amazing depth beneath their shining surface.
You can use your cardboard camera to explore and photograph the delicate underwater world, diving into the virtual ocean floor to capture the strange light-emitting creatures that live in lower depths, or you can swim up and over the surface to photograph the circling seagulls. Lighthouse. Another player can even put on a cardboard tube and float around your world.
The bird controller offers the ability to fly around the bird world by flapping cardboard wings. You hatch eggs and feed your little chicks until they join you and fly alongside you. It’s gentle and reminds me a bit of my favorite vintage N64 Pilotwings 64 .
No elephant game to accompany the elephant controller. Instead, the torso is a sectional arm with a Joy-Con at the end, allowing you to manipulate objects in 3D. We liked the cooperative game-drawing tool in the Pictionary-style, where you take turns drawing a three-dimensional object in space, and guess what drew another player. It’s a silly and fun little game, but Nintendo has included a surprisingly sophisticated set of drawing and coloring tools for rendering 3D models, hinting at deeper VR capabilities.
Perhaps the dumbest and most awesome of all Labo VR toy cons and games is the wind pedal and its associated frog-based gameplay. You put a bulky cardboard thing on the floor and make the frog jump by pressing the pedal. Cool enough, but a fan attached to the pedal sends a blast of air into your face every time you jump. It sounds silly, but the feeling of wind in the virtual world is sure to make you laugh.
The main event of minus toys for most toddlers is likely to be the blaster. The hardest to assemble, the blaster is folding the cardboard into a bazooka-like pistol. You pull the barrel back to cock it and it makes a satisfying fool sound when it fires. Not bad for cardboard and rubber bands. The accompanying games, an alien shooter on rails, and a two-player strategy game in which you have to feed little hippos, demonstrate why you don’t have a strap on your face to hold Labo. You play them a little and pass the device to a friend. No strap required. No VR calibration and tweaking. Just a funny novelty to share with a friend.
Find out how everything works
All these projects and games would be more than worthwhile, but Labo VR also contains a deeper level that’s much more educational than teaching your kids how to follow folding carton instructions.
In a world where technology can seem like magic (I mean, does anyone really know how the iPhone works?), Labo invites users behind the scenes of technology by carefully explaining and showcasing ingenious mechanisms that power toy arguments and Nintendo itself. Switch. … For example, a turntable controller works by using an IR camera built into the end of a joystick to read reflective stickers on the blade of the turntable: the faster they spin, the faster the action on the screen takes place.
Once they understand the basics of how IR camera, accelerometer, rumble and other switch functions work together with cardboard and stickers, your kids can create their own work projects. They can start from scratch with their own creations, or modify one of the existing mini-games in any way they can think of.
If you have a budding programmer in your hands, Labo is a safe and fun way to learn how to program and get creative. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any way to share Labo projects online. I’d love to see some cool home games and toys that people make with Labo VR.