How Music and Brick Building Come Together in LEGO VIDIYO

March 10, 2021 0 By Brian Crecente

LEGO® VIDIYO™ was born of a desire to mash together the endlessly creative possibilities engendered by the LEGO brick with the equally creative landscape of music.

“On the one hand, we have a creative system of play in the LEGO brick,” Will Thorogood, vice president and executive producer of LEGO VIDIYO, said during a recent episode of the Bits ‘N Bricks podcast. “Every brick that’s ever been made can be combined together in a new way to create anything you can imagine. And on the other side, you have the system of music, which is a number of notes, tones effects that you can blend in an infinite number of ways to create all music.

“So, there’s a lot of similarities between these two creative systems and we were pretty convinced there must be a way to bring them together.”

This notion kicked off a period of intense brainstorming around the concept, which failed to find a workable prototype or idea. Thorogood said that the early work focused on the opportunity space and even dug up some old music-themed prototypes from the ‘90s.

It was right after the LEGO Group had essentially given up on the idea of boiling down that big concept into something that could be turned into a product that digital design director Morgan James Walker had a eureka moment.

Walker showed off what would become the core of the idea to his boss after sketching something out over the weekend.

“I just showed them this little sketch of, you know, what became LEGO VIDIYO and just asked for permission just to give at least that one idea a little bit more breathing room,” Walker told the Our LEGO Stories podcast.

Walker was given another month to try and fill out the idea, and it was in that space of time that project came to life.

LEGO VIDIYO was built around Walker’s core concept of bringing your minifigure to life in augmented reality in your room as a member of a band. And then taking that band and use it to create your own music videos.

“The core of the idea just felt right, of all of the things we were exploring it tied everything together in an exactly the way we were looking for,” Thorogood said. “And it had the magical element of never seeing anything like this before.”

LEGO Group chief product and marketing officer Julia Goldin noted that the LEGO VIDIYO experience also taps into the LEGO Group’s mission to inspire and develop the builders of tomorrow, but in a very unique, new way.

“I think music is a massive passion point,” said Goldin. “It’s a very immersive space and I’m sure that there will be multiple opportunities for LEGO building and LEGO play to be connected into music. This is a very interesting experience in particular because it also provides kids with an opportunity to express themselves and to do it in a safe digital space.

“So, I think that will also be an area that will provide a lot of opportunity for future exploration and growth. We stay very focused on children and how they engage. We’re really looking forward to seeing what they will do with this experience. We have a lot of really exciting plans for the future, but we will be also looking and listening and understanding how kids play with LEGO VIDIYO to see how we can build on that.”

LEGO VIDIYO launched on March 1 with a set of BeatBox sets, each of which include a unique minifigure DJ, a collection of BeatBits and a collapsible stage. The free LEGO VIDIYO app captures your BeatBox collection and brings it to live as augmented reality in your real setting. You can also play without the physical toys, making the sets and app a true fluid play experience, allowing children to seamless move between the physical and digital world.

The app and sets also tap into a unique set of 21^st century skills that children increasingly need to master, Golin pointed out.

“Skills like collaboration and creative resilience and creative problem solving and critical thinking, these kinds of skills are already very much essential to drive the progress and innovation and to live in today’s world,” she said. “And I think that will only accelerate and become more important.

“I think this is a perfect way for children to have a lot of fun, but at the same time experience what it’s like to actually go through that process of learning and relearning, trying new things, thinking about things differently, working with somebody else, learning from somebody else and trying to replicate. There’s many different things involved in this experience that will undoubtedly really help them to develop.”

Thorogood said that the LEGO Group plans to continue to support the LEGO VIDIYO experience as they go through the year with both new digital and physical products.

“We’ll try to understand exactly what the creators within the app are doing,” he said. “Are there certain features that they really want to see, things that we can we can improve on, other functionalities that are missing? All of those things we’re going to be looking at together with the community to try and understand how we can continuously make the digital experience better for them.”

This article originally ran on LEGO.com as a summary of episode one of the weekly Bits N’ Bricks podcast, which you can listen to here.