Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Nintendo Labo: Is it for Maker Families?”.
Hey this is mike sinisi executive editor for make magazine, and we are checking out the new nintendo labo hands-on today here in san francisco. For those of you guys who aren’t familiar with labo, it is a brand new development kit that nintendo has uh just announced. It’S a a got: a unique uh approach to being hands-on with the nintendo switch gaming system, and that is a variety of cardboard creations that you get as flat pack pieces of cardboard put together and turn into interactive games and experiences. Some of the builds that have been announced so far that we are getting a chance to get hands-on with today include a fishing game, a cardboard piano, an rc car, a robot backpack and a few others they’re all pretty interesting. The way they work you fold them together and you put the two controller pieces from the nintendo switch inside. All this is working off of the variety of sensors that are built into the switch there’s accelerometers, uh, infrared camera, sensors and so forth. So everything is being. Is being registered and responded to in really smooth real time? Another project that we got hands on with is the cardboard piano, which is a full octave of keys, all cardboard folded and uh and color coded uh. So you can play this.
It’S polyphonic, not just single notes: you can actually do chords and and play tunes in it and uh. It’S got a really interesting aspect that there are multiple control pieces that you can pull in and take out little dials, that as you twist them – and these are all cardboard dials – they control the pitch. They control the sound the tone, but you can also take these dials out of the piano itself and put new ones in to change the traditional piano sound to a kitty cat piano sound or create a percussive sound effect using the vibrating control aspect of one of The switch controllers on a cardboard box, the mechanism of this piano works based off of the ir camera inside of the piano catching little reflective pieces that are on the back side of all of these keys as it spots these reflectors. It triggers the sound note that uh it corresponds to the key that you’re pressing, that infrared camera reflector element is an integral part to a lot of the different labo builds and is really one of the clever things that the nintendo team has figured out and put Together for this, the piece that i’m most excited about is labo garage which allows a maker to get hands-on with designing and building their own labo creations. You can repurpose the different builds that they’ve made the motorcycle, the rc car, the piano uh, to combine them so that they interact with each other. You can take the piano and turn each note into a directional aspect for the rc car or you can design something completely brand new and put labo inside of a whole new build. Imagine a electric guitar that has the lava controller uh and as you’re moving the different control pads on it. It’S triggering different sounds the design aspect of this is all based off of a block-based dragon position: uh programming environment, that nintendo is releasing with labo. As part of this garage build aspect, you specify which controller elements that you want to utilize and what the different output aspects for each of those would be, and really, i think the thing that we’re gon na find is people are probably spend hours and hours designing And building their own uh new novel creations with labo, i’m super excited about that part. Nintendo labo comes out in april, and we’re really excited to find out how much more this will develop the types of things that the different users are going to create with it and where it all goes. I think this is uh the right place, though hands-on with video games. Perfect combination, you .