Nintendo Labo Official Site | Hacker News Reader

Nintendo Labo Official Site

labo.nintendo.com

339 pointsfniephaus80 comments

Direct link to the first look video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3Bd3HUMkyU

This looks really neat, if a bit expensive. Despite owning a Switch, I can't see myself buying either kit. Maybe when more information becomes available I'll reconsider. Admittedly, I might not be in the target demographic. Although on the other hand, most Switch owners that I know are male adults.

I like anything that gets kids to play around with building stuff. Even when you're just following instructions, you get a sense of accomplishment. I'm sure after building a couple of these cardboard toys some kids will start wanting to experiment with their own creations too. Although if my limited experiences with kids are anything to go by, you'll probably need to buy a couple cardboard replacements in order to survive prolonged contact with children.

It's also a fairly innovative. I genuinely hadn't considered something like this as a possibility. Have other console developers done anything similar?

> most Switch owners that I know are male adults

Early adopter issue? Availability heuristic?

We got one in December, and I'm the one who plays it least. My two primary-school boys are enamoured with Zelda and the wife's hooked on Overcooked, and we all play Mario Kart together.

Other families with children (peers to ours) are slowly buying them. Probably helped by the fact that we rave about ours and view it as a great family activity due to all the co-op games. Other families have expressed regret they got Xbox etc.

My cousin is an elementary school girl who was very excited to get one for X-mas and plays it with her sister.

I was seeing this as directly in line with Google’s cardboard initiatives.

I also think the main point is not to sell kits but to show the way to the very few people who’ll get a spark of genius and build something original.

They also organize camps for parents to come wih their kids to build something, so I really think te goal is to stimulate creativity.

For the ‘why cardboard’ part, I also think it’s to avoid that their labo stuff are seen as long term appliances or officially sanctionned peripherals.

It's not really that expensive if you break it down. The $69 variety kit is basically 5 toys and 5 different pieces of software. Put another way, would you pay $14 for one of these with the software? The Google Cardboard kits used to be $10-$15 and they were much simpler devices.

The other one is $80 (okay a bit pricier), but it lets you "play" as the avatar instead of just waving around a wiimote (Nintendo seems to be a bit coy about weather you put the console itself in the headset to make it a VR experience, but whatever).

I think this is Nintendo about to freaking nail it again, and this shows their DNA coming from toys again. People are talking about buying more than one Switch for a household just so the kids won't fight over the labo toys. That's something Sony and Microsoft (and even Google who sort of came up with this concept) can't even dream about.

I'm really blown away by the Nintendo of the last couple years: NES Classic, SNES classic, Switch...their only execution problem at the moment seems to be getting enough hardware in stores, but it's almost like they accidentally dug up a joy vein deep in the Earth and are now selling the distilled and refined happiness to the market so we can all partake.

This Nintendo "gets" it.

>Nintendo seems to be a bit coy about weather you put the console itself in the headset to make it a VR experience, but whatever

Almost certainly not. vr on a 6" 720p screen would be an absolutely terrible experience.

Like when people said the 3DS couldn't pull off 3D without glasses...

I mean it wasn't great and I'd always turn it off until I got the new 3DS with the eye tracking.. Now it's perfect and I very rarely turn it off.

Yes, because almost no one had a glasses-free screens available at the time. But we have VR already,and low pixel count is a huge problem with it - 720p screen is going to be horrendous no matter what you do, it's been tested before and it's just not pretty.

Have you used a 720p VR headset? I have. I spent 400$ on one. It's unusable. It's out of the question. At 4x that resolution everything is a blurry, blocky, unreadable mess. 720p isn't even worth considering.

It's not really that important at toy level devices. Kids will put on and use just about anything so long as it provides some level of experience.

Until it makes them nauseous, which is a real problem with low-quality VR.

Not to mention that avoiding the trap of "let's just make it shitty, kids won't care" is kinda Nintendo's whole thing.

I'd say that their largest execution problem right now is their online offering.

It is really, really lacking now that some friends have got a Switch and we are trying to play some Splatoon together, it sucks to have to use Discord in my phone or computer while playing on the Switch just to have a proper voice chat.

I understand that Nintendo want to be as family-friendly as possible so removing the toxicity from voice chats is commendable but... Please, give me the option for that with my friends, I want a party system that works across games, in the system.

> Although if my limited experiences with kids are anything to go by, you'll probably need to buy a couple cardboard replacements in order to survive prolonged contact with children.

Kids will break it no matter what it's made from. That's why I think cardboard is a great choice because it can be fixed easily, or even just replaced for free in most cases (old delivery boxes, or the selection of free boxes you get in supermarkets, etc).

Not to mention kids can easily draw on cardboard, or paint it, etc.

I used to walk by game shops and imagine landfills overflowing with Guitar Hero controllers and Wii tennis rackets and swords and whatnot.

I dunno if the choice of cardboard is to make it seem approachable, DIY, or cost-cutting, but I appreciate it.

or biodegradable!

Maybe a bit of all the above! Like the Google Cardboard it also shows that fun can be relatively low-cost, customizable, and simple.

(Disclosure: I work at Google)

£280 without games doesn't seem very low cost to me.

Also Google Cardboard is now sold as a plastic device isn't it? Cardboard will quickly go soggy if you're playing good v game!

As someone who's been trying to find guitar hero controllers for less than $60/guitar for weeks now, I wish this were the case. :(

I used to buy my guitar controllers with their respective game (on amazon and such), it was always cheaper than the controller alone. I don't know what to do with the spare GHTV games, though...

It probably depends on where you live, but it seems every Goodwill in eastern Massachusetts always has at least 1. I was just at a Goodwill yesterday that had 2!

Apparently I am missing out on a Guitar Hero renaissance!

Even https://www.estarland.com/search?q=wireless+guitar only has XBox 360 controllers in stock.

This strikes me as a rather ingenious way to target schools, and I feel like there's going to be some really interesting indie applications developed, particularly when combined with 3D printed parts.

I hope they keep it a reasonably open platform; but then on the other hand, this is Nintendo we're talking about.

> ingenious way to target schools

I think schools buying up Nintendo Switches is probably not very likely.

You never know if they keep producing innovative educational products.

The Angry Videogame Nerd recently did a review of Lightspan Adventures, a series of edutainment games for PlayStation. I'd never heard of it -- I was in college by the time the PlayStation hit it big -- but apparently, more than one school district procured PlayStations for the express purpose of playing these games all in the name of "education".

Compared to the usual educational hardware PlayStations are really cheap. If you're putting 10k beamers with 3k PCs in every classroom, who cares about the few hundred bucks to buy a couple experimental devices that make your school look cool.

"The usual educational hardware" consisted typically of Apple IIs and overhead (transparency) projectors -- even in the mid-90s when the Lightspan stuff came out. Today might be a different story.

I am going to be impressed if this pans out.

On the surface, it looks like some of the toys may be more reliable than others - they really need to have skillful designers and coders to be able to pick up particular keys of the piano (I assume they don't have much to work with apart from vibrations).

The second part is that they are just complicated to make and not as robust as dedicated toys. Piano, or the foot pedals are examples - how many days of use until they fall apart? Will Nintendo fight copycats who provide cheap replacements?

Even if they gett all of the above wrong, I will forgive them if there will be a way to adapt or design your own gizmos and make them work without being an approved developer - this really does look like a great way to learn hacking.

I was really curious about how the piano example works too, apparently it uses a camera in the controller -

"The right Joy-Con’s motion IR camera reads the back of each key in order to tell the piano which note to play. "

http://time.com/5106363/nintendo-switch-labo-toy-cons/

It does seem a really interesting system, look forward to hearing more about it!

Yeah, pretty darn clever. With a camera you can do rotary encoders and all sorts of other awesome tricks too.

Nintendo really seems to be hitting their stride with the switch.

I always wondered what that IR plastic bit on the controller was all about... not enough to actually go research it though. Hah.

Will Nintendo fight copycats who provide cheap replacements?

You've already purchased the console and software - and Nintendo doesn't sell either at a loss. The cardboard is a trivial part of the picture.

Kids could also just cut another pattern out of their own boxes, and I bet Nintendo would love to see kids doing that.

+1. Besides, cardboard replacements still stimulate demand for more genuine Switches and games.

> how many days of use until they fall apart?

Well, it's cardboard, so you just tape or glue it back together. Or tape another layer of paper or cardboard on top.

> Will Nintendo fight copycats who provide cheap replacements?

You're paying for the software, not the cardboard.

> You're paying for the software, not the cardboard.

Indeed. $60 is a standard Nintendo game price. As far as people buying Switch games are concerned, it's free cardboard.

> I will forgive them if there will be a way to adapt or design your own gizmos and make them work without being an approved developer

We are really really close to homebrew on switch (which will let you do this).

Get a console 3.0.2 or lower, which currently have the full stack (TrustZone, Kernel, Userland, all of it) pwned. Libraries exist to interface with joycon input as well. We're just waiting on public tooling.

It's probably not what you're asking for (Mario Maker Style) - but it's doable.

Or stop buying devices that try to lock you out and force you into this cat-and-mouse game.

What about game archival? (Think redump.org, not piracy).

Is there access to the SD card to pull title updates too?

I wonder whether I should buy a second switch to backup all my titles.

There is a disaster coming to game collecting and retro gaming in the next few years. When the servers for updates go, there's going to be a lot of incomplete games around.

There's access to everything, (full kernel takeover), and there's TrustZone takeover too (think Intel ME).

> how many days of use until they fall apart?

it's cardboard, it doesn't matter

but yeah, the killer move will be software support to make your own, and it might take over the damn world (says the father of several small human children)

https://twitter.com/nintendolife/status/953941301023707138

> Nintendo Life: Nintendo Will Freely Provide Cardboard Design Patterns For Labo https://t.co/jGmyE4CZTR

Link was updated. Apparently, they're not.

Likely the cardboardiness is to encourage people to copy it - the software is where they make money surely?

It would be really cool to see some collaborations with other companies on this - Pizza boxes or whatever company uses some cardboard for packaging and targets families or kids.

I highly doubt this will be popular for adults, but for kids this could be amazing, especially if nintendo does their job right.

With the slogan "Make Play Discover" it seems like Nintendo is marketing this product as something a half step away from games and partially oriented toward the educational STEM toy market. I get Lego vibes from this.

This product may also allow Nintendo to gain a presence in retailers that they haven't worked with before. Indigo, Canada's big box book/toy retailer, stocks the Kano computer kit in their toy section but no other video games. I wouldn't be surprised to see Nintendo's Labo series appear there too.

I look forward to an indie dev making a cardboard version of the Steel Batallion controller.

This looks way too good to be true. It's a pretty awesome concept, though kinda like lego mindstorms but more focused on things that you interact with.

Hopefully there's people that come along and create kits with more durable components than the cardboard that this page and the ad show.

I'm super excited for where this is going, but $80.00 for a controller made out of cardboard that will break the first time a dog jumps on it or a child falls over.....

Definitely not too good to be true territory.

I did not notice the price. Wow, totally agree about $80 being way too much. Plastic or some other more durable material would be a big improvement to justify the cost.

Edit: It looks like they're providing templates to make these yourself too. [0] So, the $70/$80 can be considered more cardboard + software to interact with it. From that perspective, I don't think this is too bad of a deal. For something innovative like this, I personally think it's work the price of a game ($60) and then the other $20 is for cardboard, but you can just make more if it breaks.

[0] http://fr.ign.com/nintendo-labo-nintendo-switch/33103/news/n...

Or… it's $80 for a game and $0 for the controller, and then (admittedly still over-priced) price point matches their other mini-games titles (1-2 Switch, Arms)

I can imagine this causing our family to need more than one Switch. And it's totally ok if kids play rough with it and break it because you can build another one. And building it is half the fun.

I'm amazed that this announcement has barely made the front page and has only 75 comments. It's a novel release from a major brand. It's a product that would ordinarily intrigue technical types, curious people, makers, etc - people that are all over Hacker News.

Is there another discussion I've missed or is there another reason this hasn't captivated the community?

I would've thought there'd be 50+ comments each about the use of cardboard, about how the piano even works, or the potential in schools, or as an activity for parents with curious kids, etc.

My guess is that it dropped from the front page pretty quickly so not many people got to see it, which is definitely a disappointment. The front page algorithm here can be pretty perplexing at times.

The activity does seem a bit lighter, but I think 78 comments in a day (or a little more than that) qualifies as more than 'barely'.

Perhaps there'll be more activity when the product is actually released?

I've read through many negative comments on Labo (esp. on other sites) But I think - hey this is amazing as I wished to build things when I was a kid. This inspires kids to create, interact and invent. Making connections to machines or instruments we daily use.

Looking forward to support custom models.

I'm excited for this but also, at the same time, a bit skeptical about what the target for this is. It looks like it could pair well with schools and places where many different kids get to try out different things. I don't really see it working on an individual basis, though. Why would a kid want to buy this? Why would a parent want to buy it for their kid? Would an adult even want something like this?

My kids like the switch and papercraft so this seems like an ideal game for them.

To play with it.

THIS IS AMAZING

already in line!

how do they sense the piano keys?

ah, IR illumination and tracking of white dots. So the little controllers have cameras?

https://youtu.be/P3Bd3HUMkyU?t=133 (freeze the frame here to see it)

only the right one have a IR camera

As long as they keep churning out awesome AAAs and continue to get lots of quality indie and third party games to the Switch, I'm okay with this also being a thing they do.

On one hand these look way less durable than Legos.

On the other hand replacing a broken or misplaced part will be easier than with lego pieces.

They look way less painful to step on, too.

Assuming they keep it open, this could really go places.

Probably won't personally buy either one, but I think it's going to be a home run for Nintendo.

I don't get it. They're selling cardboard for 70 dollars.

With softwares that can turn them into innovative toys. So its an one time investment, if you want you can just use your blueprints to make a toy when you eventually break it

Can't wait to see all these over 30 Switch owners wearing cardboard helmets in front of their wives and kids while they play the newest legend of something.

If you've reached the age of 30 and are still afraid of looking a little silly while playing games, then you've not done a great job of growing up.

Neat, but I'd still recommend an arduino uno or a raspberry pi over a switch.

Maybe an Arduboy then.

https://arduboy.com/

thanks for that!

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