Core77

Free, Online Lego! Courtesy of Google

By Rain Noe - January 30, 2014

in Toy

Most of us who like building things loved Legos as a kid. There were just a few gripes: Inevitably you'd build something and run out of a particularly-sized piece, or you wished for different colors, or two pieces would become stuck together so badly that scientists at CERN couldn't separate them.

Well folks, the future is here. Google has teamed up with Lego to release Build with Chrome, a free, browser-based version of Lego! (Works in Firefox and Chrome, I've not tried Safari.) You select whatever sized-piece you want and drop it into your construction with mouseclicks. It's 3D, so you can rotate the build platform by dragging. You can change colors at will. And in the tutorials at least, the supply of pieces is unlimited.

Now I know that a large part of Lego's appeal is the tactility, and the empowering feeling a child gets from constructing something with their grubby little mitts. But at least your pops isn't going to step on one of these in the living room, accidentally teaching you, at perhaps too tender an age, words like "#*$&%@!!!"

There's also a map feature where you can click around the globe to see what others have built. But one creepy element that they really ought to eliminate is that it shows you the exact address and name of the child who built it. Google's lawyers, we assume, are too busy building things out of Lego to have caught this.

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Andi

10 years ago

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is there a way to export and/or render your lego work?
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Nathan Sokalski

10 years ago

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Lego has had software that lets you do this for years! It even allows you to generate building instructions. Will this software be any better or easier to use? I can't say, since I haven't tried it yet, but having unlimited pieces isn't the problem I often have when building with it, it is finding all the pieces I want. I have been a major Lego lover for almost 30 years, and still use most of the pieces in my creations. But some of those pieces are no longer manufactured, and some of the ones that are aren't included in the software. In order for the software to be truly useful, I need to be able to use all the pieces that I have in my real creations.
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sthgrau

10 years ago

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FYI, if you think you might want to save it, log in first. I only logged in afterwards and it lost my work.
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