Brickit recognizes Lego blocks and suggests buildings with instructions
Hand on heart, who of you played with the beautiful colorful plastic bricks from Lego in your childhood? All those who feel addressed at the moment are sure to think of beautiful castles, cars with an interesting design and Lego technology boxes. But if you should have been as lazy as I was, all the stones ended up in the same box.
My old Lego bricks should still be wildly mixed up in our attic, so that one day they can be put to good use again, you would have to take an afternoon to sort them. Or you can use an interesting new app from the App Store that was developed by Lego fans: Brickit!
What does the app do? Something that no Lego app has done before. The colorfully mixed stones are scanned with the smartphone camera and analyzed by an algorithm. Mark Wilson of Fast Company then did a self-experiment in his son’s room and had both positive and negative experiences.
Mixed together in a heap, the app has difficulty finding the right stones, but once it is spread out and identified more precisely, the software actually suggests construction plans. These are similar to those illustrated in paper instructions and show the fastest route to the building.
The bottom line: The app still has a few problems, crashes and other errors every now and then. Nevertheless, the approach is promising; TechCrunch magazine even goes so far and suggests that Lego buy the app and sell it itself. Either way you can quickly bring order to the Lego chaos with Brickit.
Own opinion:
Algorithms determine our everyday life, the example of Brickit shows that technology will find its way more and more into children’s toys. The approach is promising, but one approach is and remains the most beautiful: using your own imagination.
Via Fast Company
