Of all the demos onstage at Apple’s big event Monday, nothing was quite as crazy as the augmented reality demo from Lego. We chatted with the company’s Director of Innovation Martin Sanders about how they’re building AR into the company strategy.
Hey everybody so we are here at WWDC and There was a lot of cool AR kitten news Today One of the standout demonstrations on Stage was from Lego and we have Martin From Lego here who’s got some cool stuff To talk about so we had a physical model That you brought to life and it came With all this rich content in this world And that really firs was amazing but Then he also had a twist to it where we Had multiplayer so now up to four Players can now create together in the Same space And that’s truly magic as well what was Possible in this build that you know you Would have been unable to do an AR kit One dot oh like what functionality were You adding exactly I think the the big Turning point and the big kind of Gateway technology for us was object Detection so before we could create Virtual versions of our Lego sets and Bring them to life in AR now we can use Our 3d objects to really anchor the Worlds now so that was it that was it Really so how do you think augmented Reality plays well with physical toys And you know as so many people kind of Worry about their kids only playing with You know their iPad or something like How does this relationship between Physical toys and digital you know Tablets and stuff like how does that
Relationship benefit Lego in the long Run you know parents have often had a Little stigma attached a lot of screen Time but they’ve always loved the idea That kids are have a hands-on minds-on Experience and now we get that bridge Literally with object detection it Bridges that gap and it mixes the Realities seamlessly so we think kids Are gonna have more of this parallel Experience so they’ll have the digital Device and they’ll have their physical Toys together and with that I’ll open up All these great creative play Possibilities so I think it’ll be Received quite well by parents obviously By children and obviously for us it’s Very exciting to have our product Anchored in those very rich digital Experiences that were before that Exclusively a videogame it opens up all The richness of videogames into the Physical worlds really well so they were Looking forward to that Then one last thing so you know a lot of The developers who saw AR kit 2 today They’re gonna go download the beta and Play with a little bit you’ve had some Time to actually work with AR kit to Like has anything kind of surprise you Any features like you new object Recognition was gonna be huge for being Able to build this app but did anything Else kind of surprise or impress you or
The multi-user support it seems like Such a simple feature but to create Together is the next level I think you Know it really turns a corner from a Creative perspective when you and your Friend can sort of collaborate compete And do all these great things you start Thinking about games you could make Together stories you can made together So I think that for us is a there’s Another light bulb went off we’re Multi-user support is a kind of a hidden Gem as well so we’re looking forward to Really kind of diving into that world
