It’s been a while since we heard anything about the interesting Augmented Reality Lego Set kiosk that mysteriously popped up in Illinois, but a press release lets us know that it was created by MetaIO, and will now be coming to all Lego stores worldwide.
“The DIGITAL BOX helps consumers get a better impression of our products,” says Torben Nielsen, Director of 3D technology from the LEGO Group´s Digital Development Department, and adds: “we`ve had very positive feedback from our stores and customers. Thanks to metaio`s technology, we can excite and inform our customers on a new level.”
Read the full release and see a demonstration video of the technology, after the break.
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Science augmented reality, lego, metaio
Another great entry at the OnlineSchools.org website, this time chronicling the history of LEGO, my favorite childhood toy. Covering the original business founded by Ole Kirk Christiansen in 1932 through the recent 50th anniversary of the brick in 2008.
I remember getting the Legoland Castle for Christmas one year (1984 I guess by the chart). Still my favorite set of all time. What was yours?
The History of Legos.
Graphics infographic, lego, timeline
Those great little plastic blocks that kept us all busy with ideas are under fire from the “Maelstrom” in a new Massive Multiplayer Online game from NetDevil.
With a creative and building focus, LEGO Universe invites players to explore, battle, make friends, and flex their imaginations with the brick in a vibrant online world. Developed by The LEGO Group and NetDevil, LEGO Universe is a family-friendly online game, appropriate for players aged eight and above. The LEGO brick lies at the center of the experience, and several levels of building are available, from simple gameplay-oriented challenges all the way up to sophisticated brick-by-brick building.
The game itself looks like pretty standard MMO fare: Help NPC, earn “Plastic”, use “Plastic” to buy blocks and weapons, repeat. Unlike other MMO’s, however, it uses the entire Lego brand so that you can fight in medieval castles, space stations, formula 1 race cars, and more. Watch the trailer above first, then go check out their website.
Graphics lego, mmo, videogame
If you’ve ever wondered what happens to all the odd crackpot half-finished ideas in life, Lego has a short film online to answer just that.
Ever wonder where big ideas come from? If you’re a fan of LEGO bricks, eureka moments, or guys with odd mustaches, you really should see this. Great ideas just CL!CK.
Including some impressive stop-motion, lighting, color correction, and more, it’s a surprisingly high-quality short film. I’ve embedded it after the break, but don’t miss out on their fun blog either.
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Graphics lego, short, vfx
Near the end of Summer 2009, James May took it upon himself to construct an entire 2-story house out of every child’s favorite construction toy, Lego Bricks. Part of his BBC show ‘Toy Stories’, he enlisted the help of Barnaby Gunning Architects to help him build and design it, all within a two week timespan. To get it done in time, they used Luxology’s Modo to design it first.
“modo 401 gave us a feel for the material quality of LEGOs as a large-scale building material long before we were actually able to put any of the components together,” said Gunning. “It made it easy for us to lay out exactly what we needed to build this structure and helped keep tabs on the number of bricks being used for each piece.”
A textured virtual model of the entire LEGO house was also made and used to explore the layout and overall design of the final product. Gunning explained how using modo helped speed up his design process, saying, “Creating the instructions for building each component could have been very time consuming. Instead, we were able to write a simple script that created the various pyramids quickly from our virtual LEGO set, which was a major added benefit.”
Read the full press release after the break, and check out a few fun videos of the home construction and James May’s experiences living inside it for 2 days.
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Graphics bbc, lego, modo, television
A video found on YouTube shows a kiosk in the Shaumberg, IL mall’s Lego Store where you can hold up a lego box and magically see a preview of the constructed set overlaid on the box. It’s a clever use of Augmented Reality for marketing.
See the demonstration video after the break.
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Hardware augmented reality, lego
Will Evans has a new post on Semantic Foundry about “Mood Maps” for mapping a user’s state of mind throughout user experience testing. At the end he shows a great infographic from Lego (above).
By way of my friend Doc Baty, I stumbled upon a blog post by Bruce Timkin which shows another way to visualize the aggregated mood maps and present an Experience Wheel like the one he found at Lego, although it is unclear what research, activities, or methods are used to arrive at the Experience Wheel – it’s still an interesting way to visualize the total user experience in phases.
via Design Ethnography & Mood Maps.
Science lego, moodmap, semanticfoundry
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