Lego revealed its Lego Vidiyo concept recently and now it has released details around the full lineup of sets which will be available from 1 March.
Vidiyo is, essentially, a music video maker app but one that uses AR so you can incorporate the sets you buy into your videos. The music itself comes from Universal Music Group who are going to be adding more music into the app to add to the tunes already available from artists such as The Weeknd, Mabel, Imagine Dragons and 5 Seconds of Summer.
We've been using two BeatBox sets from the system with the app, while you can also get BandMates, essentially blind bag minifigures you can also incorporate in your videos.
Each set comes with BeatBits scannable pieces that give you different effects you can apply to your video or play like instruments - you can mix and match these and Lego says there are going to be around 130 of them launching in the first year.
The BeatBoxes come with a minifigure representing a specific music genre, a stage you can scan, two special BeatBits and 14 random BeatBits.
The app itself is free and, should you not have any sets, you can create virtual figures instead rather than scanning the sets you have.
Once you've created your video you can share to a (safe and moderated) social feed which appears in the app for other users. No identifiable people are allowed to appear in the videos.
We found the app was very easy to use once we got into the process of using it, but in our early version, some of the loading screens in the app were slow. The addition of the Universal tunes is really welcome as it means you're actually creating visuals for a song you (probably) know well already.
Our seven-year-old got very into creating the videos although after a while was more interested in playing with the sets rather than creating more content in the app. We can imagine how older kids would enjoy the video creation even more.
William Thorogood, executive producer of Lego Vidiyo told us during a briefing that this experience will be improved for launch. Thorogood also told us that what the team were looking to do was "bring the two creative worlds together.
"We have a very creative building experience with the Lego brick system, and we have creative expression throughout the music industry, through various notes and tones and effects and sounds that come together to create the music that we know and love."
"We really wanted to find that magic mix of those two worlds. We've made music video making super fun and accessible and we're really targeting kids between 7 to 10 years old with this experience. We also wanted to make it really safe.
"One of the things we talk about at Lego quite often is fluid play. And that's where we bring physical play and digital play together in one seamless experience. For kids play is play, they don't really see the difference between physical play and digital play - it's all just having fun and playing, but certainly the families and parents that we've spoken to, as we develop these fluid play experiences, really value having digital experiences that are creative and allow the kids to experiment in new creative ways and play in a safe environment."
All the Lego Vidiyo sets so far
There are six BeatBoxes and 12 Bandmates at present although it sounds like more sets are planned for later in 2021.
43102 - Candy Mermaid BeatBox: £17.99
43103 - Punk Pirate Beatbox: £17.99
43104 - Alien DJ BeatBox: £17.99
43105 - Party Llama BeatBox: £17.99
43106 - Unicorn DJ BeatBox: £17.99
43107 - HipHop Robot BeatBox: £17.99
43101 - Bandmates: Red Panda Dancer; Cotton Candy Cheerleader; Shark Singer; Bunny Dancer; Discowboy Singer; Genie Dancer; Samurapper; DJ Cheetah; Ice Cream Saxophonist; Alien Keytarist; Banshee Singer; Werewolf Drummer: £3.99 each