Lego Vidiyo: Here’s how you can make Augmented Reality music videos with your minifigures

Lego has launched a new range of kits for making AR music videos with a bunch of new wacky characters. Here’s how it works.

Lego Vidiyo is a new product line from the toy manufacturing giant that lets you create your own AR music videos with a range of misfit minifigures. We’ve got our hands on the brand new sets, so here’s how to get groovy with your plastic pals:

In each BeatBox kit (retailing for £17.99), there’s a Bandmate, several BeatBit tiles, and a carry case for the ensemble. The character design is funky, the kits are easy to assemble, and it all packs neatly away. But there’s surprisingly little to do with the physical product — the real fun only kicks in when you download the Vidiyo app and get your wacky music-related minifig throwing shapes in Augmented Reality.

Once you’ve scanned your character along with a few BeatBit tiles, you can choose a song from the library, place the digital dancer into a real-life environment with your smartphone camera, and record the ensuing entertainment. In this virtual video the tiles act as special effects, so you could create a tropical forest or send a rainbow-fuelled cat zooming through the air while the Party Llama shakes his maracas with gleeful abandon.

There are a total of six BeatBoxes, including the Party Llama and Punk Pirate on show in the above video, and twelve other Bandmate minifigures are also available to fill out your band’s roster, in smaller kits that are priced at £3.99.

Those of us who grew up in previous generations might associate Lego with clumps of random multi-coloured bricks (possibly with bitemarks) all haphazardly mixed together in a big box, but the manufacturer has evidently diversified and moved with the times to create tech-enhanced kits such as Vidiyo, and official tie-in products with big brands such as Star Wars and Marvel. This product launch was even commemorated by a music video featuring Ne-Yo:

The new toy is an interesting addition to the range — but can it successfully tap into the trends of the TikTok generation? We’ll just have to wait and see.