Labo VR: how Mario and Zelda look and play in virtual reality

Super Mario Odyssey and Zelda: Breath of the Wild running in virtual reality on Switch? Count us in. On paper, the idea sounds insane - but from Gear VR to Oculus Quest, there's a proven track record of mobile chipsets delivering some good experiences. On top of that, as Martin and Ian have already described, Labo VR's various demos, games and experiences are an absolute delight. But pushing VR to titles that already tax Switch hardware to its limits? That's another challenge altogether.

Easily the most ambitious exercise from Nintendo is migrating the entirety of Zelda: Breath of the Wild into virtual reality. The idea is that you can play in Switch handheld or docked configuration as per normal, but when the mood strikes you, you can pick up the console, insert it into the Toy-Con cardboard shell and switch the view into full VR.

And it's at this point where the key compromises become clear. Virtual reality works best by using a high resolution screen and a high frame-rate, with 60fps the acknowledged minimum for VR experiences - even in the mobile space. Zelda is immediately challenged by deficiencies there on both counts. The standard game runs at 30 frames per second with some performance dips, but these deviations from the target frame-rate are amplified when running in VR - presumably because the entire scene is rendered twice, with unique viewpoints for each eye. The bottom line is that performance jumps between 30fps and 20fps, causing genuine motion sickness problems.

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