Lego is nothing if not masterful at its own reinvention. As a one-brand company, it really has to be. But the future of play could easily look different to how it has been in the past, and even how it is today, so how is Lego planning to reinvent the brick for children who spend less time playing with physical toys and more time playing with tablets? "Kids are moving digital platforms earlier," acknowledges David Gram, Lego's marketing director, speaking at The Conference in Malmo. "They are growing up in ways we cannot even imagine."From speaking to parents, Lego knows that mums and dads are concerned about the passive nature of many digital play activities, and are keen to steer their children towards more creative activities that demand they use their imaginations.Lego's Future Lab has taken this on as a challenge. The Future Lab consists of ten individuals from across the world who Gram describes as "rebels" that have complete freedom to create whatever they want, as long as it stays true to Lego's core brand beliefs.
This means that making sure products have longevity (Lego bricks are built to last forever), that they inspire the builders of tomorrow and that they enhance children's ability to be creative and express themselves. This team of people allows the company to stay nimble, to experiment on a small scale very fast. Every year they release three of four new products into different markets around the world.[h2]"We wish we invented Minecraft"[/h3]Lego was one of the first companies in Europe to own a computer, and now says Gram, "these devices are becoming the kids' primary platform for play". In order to go about completing the leap between the two, the company went back and looked at its major innovative successes over the years. "We actually invented the wheel back in the seventies," he jokes, which allowed Lego to include vehicles in kits. Now 70 percent of kits incorporate vehicles and has apparently made the company the biggest tyre manufacturer in the world. Next came the minifigure and then, says Gram, "we experimented with robots but that was not a success".
"It really comes down to the brick, the core brick," is what Lego concluded. How though could the company's teams put this on a screen? Obviously, Gram says, they were inspired by Minecraft and knew that they could learn from it. "Minecraft is digital Lego," he says. "We only wish we had invented it."The final result was Lego Fusion, which launched in pilot form in the US last week. Gram describes it as mixture between Civilisation and The Sims.Players have to build and populate a town, but in order to build houses on the screen they have to be build them physically with bricks first. They build the facade, capture it with the tablet or phone camera, which then makes it into a 3D building on the screen.The company was keen to go back to what the core of what the original Lego experience was, which means there are no instructions and no structures that users are told to build.The key challenge for Lego in approaching this project, says Gram, was proving something new needed to happen. The best way to prove it is to actually launch something, he adds, which is where the company is at now.
It was also important that they internalised the challenge, because by staying true to the company's core DNA, Lego fully supported it and is committed to working out whether it is scalable from the pilot. He reiterates though that every company needs rebels, but rebels who know how to make things happen. "It's easy to set things on fire, and to rebel, but it's hard to get everyone to follow". Be diplomatic, accept that people will hate your project, understand the rules that you're breaking, build a tribe and make people shine.LEGO® Fusion has retired We hope you had fun combining LEGO® bricks with digital game play. Even though Fusion is no longer, you can still have fun with LEGO bricks in the digital world. Create anything you can imagine out of bricks with LEGO Worlds. FIND MORE PRODUCTS LIKE THIS Lego Fusion lets you build virtual playgrounds with real-world bricks If your child is constantly glued to a tablet swiping away at birds or fruit, you're probably wistfully wishing for the days when kids liked playing with actual toys.
Well, Lego just might have the perfect solution for you and your offspring. Today, the maker of the beloved construction bricks announced Lego Fusion, a system that combines the flexibility and fun of app-based games with the good ol' fashioned activity of creative Lego building. Gallery: Lego Fusion | Developed by Lego's Future Lab, Fusion was invented as a way to marry digital and analog play. Ditte Bruun Pedersen, a senior design manager of the Lab, tells us that during its research, the Lego team discovered that children don't really differentiate physical play from digital. "To them, it's not two separate worlds. It's one world that blends together. It's all just play." However, games on tablets and phones remain popular with kids because of how immersive they are, so the trick is to put the two worlds together.The Lego folks identified three sorts of games that kids typically like: Tycooning, which involves building and managing, tower defense style games and racing. And so they've come up with four different Lego Fusion games to fit those categories.
Lego Fusion Town Master lets you create a miniature Lego city, Lego Fusion Battle Towers puts you in a medieval battle where you'll need the best castle and fighters, and Lego Fusion Create & Race has you creating a customized car for either a time-based race or a demolition derby. The fourth game, Lego Fusion Resort Designer, is very similar to Town Master except that it lets you decorate the interior of buildings as well.Each Lego Fusion set consists of 200 bricks along with a special "capture" brick building plate that's meant to be paired with a corresponding app. To play the Town Master game, for example, you would build a two-dimensional facade on the base plate, say the front of a house with a door, two windows and a roof (buildings can be up to 16 bricks high and 16 bricks wide). You'd then launch the app's camera function to focus on the printed pattern, which is used as an identification tag. This essentially lets the app figure out exactly the size and colors of the Lego bricks you've built on the plate, enabling it to import and translate that physical creation into the digital realm.
The app is then intelligent enough to transform the two-dimensional front of a house into a three-dimensional virtual building to be placed in the game. Lego tells us it uses Qualcomm's Vuforia mobile vision platform for this process."For most kids, if you simply give them a pile of bricks and tell them to build something, they go blank," says Pedersen. By pairing a game objective with the bricks, it gives them a prompt to actually get something started. "The games are used to facilitate creativity," she says.All the apps are free to download and experience for free so kids (and their parents, of course) can familiarize themselves with the game's mechanics and requirements before committing to it. However, all of these apps do actually require the physical Lego set to progress. You can't build a building in the game without those physical bricks.Additionally, the Lego Fusion games are designed to encourage kids to keep on building beyond the initial steps. With Town Master, you're constantly given missions to appease the townspeople and run the city.
In Battle Towers, you'll have to upgrade your castle with defenses depending on the kinds of enemies the game pits against you. As for the racing game, well, you can't beat your last time or destroy your competition without making your car sleeker and meaner. "It drives kids back and forth from the tablet to brick building," explains Pedersen.Further, since all the creations are stored digitally in the Lego world -- you can save them to the cloud with a Lego ID -- children are able to carry on with the game even after they've put their bricks away for the day. If the parents allow it, kids can connect with their friends using their Lego credentials too. They can visit each other's towns, see how the other person's tower looks like and even race those cars against each other. It also presents the opportunity for the child to learn from what their friends have made, and perhaps improve upon their creations.Each of the Lego Fusion sets cost $34.99 and will be available at Toys R Us, Lego stores and Legoland locations in the US and online.