This is good news for Lego fans. After 2 years being experimented by a team in Australia, the online Lego creator has been brought to life, just in time before the Lego movie hits theaters. It is named Build with Chrome.
The tool originated from the partnership between Lego Group and Google Chrome when they wanted to bring creative freedom of Lego bricks to the Web. Now, you can build Lego buildings right in your web browser as long as it support WebGL, a 3D graphics technology. If you are using Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox, you are ready to go because those browsers enable WebGL by default. In case you use Safari, you will need to turn it on by going to Preference – Advanced tab, check on “Show Develop menu in menu bar“. Then you will find the Develop menu on menubar of Safari, open the menu and click on Enable WebGL. Now, you can start enjoying the Lego world on your computer.
Actually, you can even open the tool with web browsers on your smartphone, both Firefox and Chrome for mobile support WebGL. So, you still can interact with Lego bricks with your fingertips. Here is the interface of the Lego builder tool.
To make it easier to interact with the Lego bricks, you can use some shortcuts like mousewheel to zoom, arrowkeys to rotate bricks and right click to remove a brick. There are a lot of limitations of this tool compared to the real experience, however, I still found it enjoyable. If you find it difficult to use the tool, there is a Build Academy section to help you master the skills.
After finishing, you can log in to Google Plus, publish your work on Google Maps and share it to others. We can also see what others have build by going to the Explore all Builds section. There you can see a lot of buildings, characters or vehicles built by other people and pinpointed on the Google Maps. Check out the video by Google below and try Build with Chrome here.
Samir says
Seems pretty awesome. Building lego with google chrome is really fun and useful too. Thanks for sharing