In recent years, the Lego, invented in Denmark in 1949, lives a new life: ever richer and more complex sets, models of everyday objects, superheroes, science fiction films, even a bonsai tree to be built to finally have that plant in the house that never dies.
But many still have a basket or two of old Legos, saved from the games of when the parents (or in some cases even the grandparents) were young: colored bricks in bulk without a precise plan, which until now were useless, at least compared to the sumptuousness of modern packaging and objects that can be bought nowadays. Until someone wondered if it was possible to do something with it.
That someone is Brickit, a company founded by Andrey Tatarinov and Leonid Alexandrov, two big Lego fans (but in no way connected to the company) who had not one, but two really clever ideas, no doubt about it.
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How Brickit works
The first is the most surprising: why not use artificial intelligence to analyze all the Lego pieces available and catalog them? We spread a lot of old Legos on the table and in seconds the app scanned and recognized them with a refined and fast artificial intelligence system. In our experience, once the bricks were properly arranged on the table, not a single one was wrong.
Based on this, it is quite easy for the app proposes dozens of objects that can be created: from airplanes to ships, from an old hi-fi to a funny mustache crocodile. There is everything, even if sometimes (the negative surprise) the app offers objects to build that are missing a piece or two. Or even five. You can order them online or buy in Lego stores, which offer individual pieces on request, but this immediately spoils the fun a bit. The designs are created by the online community of Lego enthusiasts and are not company officials. Some are very funny.
Once you have decided which object you want to create, the app offers more step by step instructions to make it (the same ones found in the boxes of the Lego itself), but also indicates which piece it corresponds to among those in the image taken of the bricks scattered on the table, so that it becomes very easy to identify it, especially if you have a thousand colored bricks available .
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Finally, there is the second, very good idea: if you already have a lot of Lego scattered around, but you want to buy and build a particular official set (for example an expensive model of Star Wars), Brickit suggests how to do it. The app, which is very well made, even with videos that explain, for example, how to orient the camera to better photograph the bricks or how to build the models, in fact also offers another function. It is possible to reconstruct classic sets sold by Lego starting from what we have available, and buy what is eventually missing. For example, if you decide to build the gigantic cruiser of Star Wars, the app compares what you have with what you need and explains what is missing and should be bought, brick by brick.
Brickit is for iPhone only for now, ma la version for android is coming (according to the developers, “immediately after the summer”). The app is completely free and in the Apple version does not collect any type of information except the number of bricks in our possession to identify which projects we can carry out.
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