The toy industry has given us plenty of radio-controlled cars that are modeled after the Mario Kart franchise. But the $100 Mario Kart Life: Home Circuit, announced last month, promises to be the first to integrate such a toy car with an augmented reality camera and attendant Switch game experience.
While we haven’t gotten any hands-on time with Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit yet, we were able to participate in a recent livestream demo of the RC car/AR app combo ahead of its planned October 16 release. What we saw doesn’t quite match up to a full-fledged Mario Kart game, but it looks like it could add a lot of creativity and imaginative play opportunities to the standard RC car experience.
The demo walked us through the Mario Kart Live setup process, which starts off by using the camera on the Kart to scan a QR code found on the free downloadable Switch app (that app won’t work at all without the Kart). With that scan, the Kart and Switch are connected directly via Wi-Fi, without the need for any router or live Internet connection.
When you put the Kart down, you get an over-the-shoulder view of what the camera sees on your Switch screen (either docked or in handheld mode, standard or Switch Lite). Nintendo isn’t discussing specifics of the streaming resolution/frame rate of this setup, but a Nintendo representative said he hadn’t seen any latency between the Switch controls and the physical movements of the Kart itself.
The camera’s positioning means you don’t see the actual physical Kart from this view. Instead, you see your Kart represented as an animated 3D model at the bottom of the livestreamed camera view. This can lead to some lively interactions, like when Mario playfully gets your attention by knocking on the “camera’s” glass.
