The folder generation
With the Labo VR Kit, Nintendo returns to virtual reality after a quarter-century away
With the Labo VR Kit, Nintendo makes a return to virtual reality
At E3 2012, three Nintendo executives posed for a photo that became a classic. Standing by a 4x4 outside the LA Convention Centre, Reggie Fils-Aimé is shaking Shigeru Miyamoto’s hand, and Satoru Iwata has rested his own right palm over the top. All three are smiling. Internet wags christened it the Triforce, which is probably about as flattered as Fils-Aimé has ever been.
The outgoing president of Nintendo Of America – he leaves on April 15, to be replaced by the immaculately named Doug Bowser – is no game developer. The cult of personality around him (‘My body is ready’ and the rest of it) started out as ironic and became affectionate, which is some achievement for a man who spoke in bullet points, parroting marketing lines that had come down the pipe from NCL. The rare occasions on which he gave interviews were masterclasses in the art of saying nothing while seeming to talk a lot. Yet, perhaps as a parting gift, an announcement for Switch has made one of Fils-Aimé’s interview responses appear insightful. Folks, he finally said something.
At E3 last year, he was asked about Nintendo’s stance on VR. “We have knowledge of the technical space, and we’ve been experimenting with it for a long, long time,” he said. “What we believe is that, in order for this technology to move forward, you need to make it fun, and you need to make it social. Based on what I’ve seen to date, it’s not fun, and it’s not social. It’s just tech.”
Enter Nintendo Labo: VR Kit, a range of constructible cardboard toys that marks Nintendo’s return to virtual reality almost
25 years after the failed launch of Virtual Boy, and that fulfils Fils-Aimé’s stated criteria. The social requirement has been met by the simple virtue of there being no headset. You’ll build a series of Toy-Cons into which the Switch must be inserted, and then hold them up to your eyes, with no strap to keep the in place. Once you’re done, there’s no sweaty HMD to take off; you just hand the Toy-Con to the person sitting next to you. How odd, and yet perfect, that the answer to Nintendo’s scepticism of the most futuristic gaming technology on the market should be the View-Master, which turns 80 this year.
And fun? Well. This too has its roots in the strapless design. If playing with a VR Toy-Con involves holding it up to your head, then the Toy-Con itself must also be the handles and the input device. So there is a VR Blaster, the barrel protruding from your nose, one hand on the trigger and the other at the muzzle to keep it steady. The ToyCon Camera repurposes Joy-Con inputs as shutter buttons and focus dials. The Toy-Con Elephant essentially gives you a cardboard trunk to swing around. There’s a bird, and you look up its bottom for some reason. On it goes.
Yet the real thing that makes this latest Labo pack social and fun is, of course, Labo itself. Its projects are meant to be built with company; likewise the minigames and Garage experiments that follow a completed build. More than anything else Nintendo has yet done on Switch, it calls back to and continues on the promise of the Wii and DS era: something that can be enjoyed by people of any age irrespective of their level of gaming experience. And, just as those consoles introduced new generations to your favourite hobby, so might Labo be the thing that gets VR into sceptics’ hands.
There has been much debate about Labo’s value for money: naysayers point out that it is exorbitantly priced for something made primarily from cardboard. Yet it suddenly feels pretty cheap. Sure, Google Cardboard, on the face of it this new Labo kit’s closest cousin, can be had for less. Likewise the raft of cheap and cheerful headsets into which you can slot a smartphone. But none of those involve a build process as satisfying as anything Lego has ever mustered, bundled homebrew development software, or a silly little game or two made by one of the greatest developers of all time.
So, just as this causes us to find, just in time, a new level of appreciation for Nintendo Of America’s outgoing president, so the VR Kit demands a reexamination of what Labo represents. It is still today, as it was before, a fun little toy that brings families together in ways that Switch might otherwise struggle to. Yet it is also slowly transforming into a testbed for the side of Nintendo that we find most fascinating, and which we don’t see so much of these days. The one unafraid to try new things, to take risks, to be silly, and put out products no other company in the industry would even consider, much less actually take on.
It is a virtual reality elephant made out of cardboard, for heaven’s sake. And perhaps it will turn out to be rubbish. But as the industry grows more conservative amid the sense that you are only ever one failure away from being out of business, Labo’s existence remains something to be cheered. And if nothing else, it means Reggie Fils-Aimé leaves with a legacy made up of more than just memes.
Build a series of Toy-Cons into which the Switch must be inserted, and then hold it up to your eyes