Lego Smart Brick General Discussion/Concerns Topic

[Auroralampinen]

12 hours ago, Mylenium said:

 

Yes, of course. It's ADHD everywhere, fueled by social media.

Mylenium

Well, i have not publicly spoken about this. But i have ADHD and Asperger. I was diagnosed when i was 5 year old:).

[Mylenium]

9 hours ago, JesseNight said:

It has its uses, just not for everyone. Think of professional pilot training, especially fighter pilots. Tactical training. Surgery training for doctors. It gives them an immersive way to practice without risks or extra costs beyond the VR hardware and the training software. But not just that, engineers and designers make use of it too to put things together and view their work in a true 3D environment to watch it from all directions.

Exactly the point.

9 hours ago, JesseNight said:

As for hobby/enthusiast use, I guess it is a niche indeed. It has been growing significantly over the past 10 years though, and not just during covid. Plenty of people like this level of immersion into a social environment with people they cannot be with irl (for example due to distance), or to be immersed into a game world.

It's still niche, though. and that kind of is the problem. Nobody has overcome this classic chicken vs. egg problem. Users don't buy it because the devices are expensive and there is no content and developers don't produce content because there isn't enough of a mass basis. That and of course there are serious issues with interaction models, motion sickness, eye problems and so on. And to me those virtual worlds are also kind of stupid. VR does nothing that a phone call or cam chat can't. It's kind of like the hologram communicators in sci-fi movies. It looks cool, but adds nothing.

Mylenium

6 hours ago, Auroralampinen said:

Well, i have not publicly spoken about this. But i have ADHD and Asperger. I was diagnosed when i was 5 year old:).

Yeah, I know it's a bad analogy, but in the moment I couldn't think of a better word. ;-)

Mylenium

[ShaydDeGrai]

5 hours ago, Mylenium said:

It's still niche, though. and that kind of is the problem. Nobody has overcome this classic chicken vs. egg problem. Users don't buy it because the devices are expensive and there is no content and developers don't produce content because there isn't enough of a mass basis.

VR has actually been around for a long time.  It goes back to Ivan Southerland in the 1960's.  Back then it was a cool gimmick that the media latched onto which set unrealistic expectations and the whole thing died out because everyone was focused on the gimmick and not on the context.

The twenty years later, it resurged again (ushered in by genuine technology advances) and, again, company stepped in to try and sell the gimmick, dismissed the context and applications as an afterthought and the media, again, sensationalized the whole thing to set unrealistic expectations among the general public (think, The Thirteenth Floor, The Lawmower Man, The Matrix, etc vs Mitsubisi's Diamond Park and BattleZone 3D, etc) And the everyone soured on the idea again.

Another twenty years later and we have another round of cool new (overpriced) devices back by company that still think the gimmick is enough to move the product with actual applications a mere afterthought.

Hmmm, not unlike an overhyped "smart" brick being marketed with subpar Star Wars inspired models just to sell a gimmick that Hallmark greeting cards (like the ones that play Happy birthday when you open them up or the halloween cards that make creepy sound effects when you "disturb" them ) have been using for years.

As for the chicken and egg problem, I think the biggest issue is that they's been going after the wrong market.  Augmented reality would be an easier nut to crack (though even Google's Glass ain't there yet)  They shouldn't be trying to mass market the stuff on day one; they should look to things like the way that photocopiers and 3d printers became "a thing": Sell top quality industrial grade units to companies who can afford them and employ lots of people and get their employees saying, "This is cool I wish I had something like this at home"  Them gradually introduce cheaper and smaller units, using the fact that they are designed for home use and affordability as the primary excuse as to why they are underpowered compared to the industrial models.   Imagine an aircraft mechanic wearing AR googles that can display the schematics and maintenance checklist for the engine in front of them as their working - that gives way to the guy at your local garage whose AR glasses can scan all the parts in his/her field of vision for wear/cracks versus factory specs and draws bright circles around them to make sure the mechanic notices - now imagine sitting at a table staring at a pile of Lego parts and an instruction book and having your AR glasses point out where in the pile that damned 1x1 plate with horizontal clip in Earth Green is hiding.   You don't need killer apps with mass appeal on day one, you need people thinking "wouldn't it be cool if..." and then be able to actually deliver the next big step in that direction.

[Napoleon3]

1 hour ago, ShaydDeGrai said:

Another twenty years later and we have another round of cool new (overpriced) devices back by company that still think the gimmick is enough to move the product with actual applications a mere afterthought.

 You don't need killer apps with mass appeal on day one, you need people thinking "wouldn't it be cool if..." and then be able to actually deliver the next big step in that direction.

Now imagine sitting at a table staring at a pile of Lego parts and an instruction book and having your AR glasses point out where in the pile that damned 1x1 plate with horizontal clip in Earth Green is hiding.

Agreed, there are two reasons why you make a product : to make a profit and/or to solve a problem (when someone asks "wouldn't it be useful if..."). Turns out that focusing on the second almost always leads to the first, but nowadays people try to focus on the first and overhype everything to sell it, it works at first, but customers wisen up, so after a bit gimmicks stop selling, but for some odd reason businesses still haven't figured out why.

The idea you suggest is actually really cool, especially since that saves a lot of time, then again I am the type who sorts every part and then builds, so it wouldn't serve me much, but it is still very cool as a concept and has its uses outside of sets (e.g. if you are digging in a pile of bricks to make a MOC). If only AI was focused on that instead of making sloppy content.

Edited Friday at 04:48 PM by Napoleon3
added stuffs.

[JesseNight]

12 hours ago, Mylenium said:

It's still niche, though. and that kind of is the problem. Nobody has overcome this classic chicken vs. egg problem. Users don't buy it because the devices are expensive and there is no content and developers don't produce content because there isn't enough of a mass basis. That and of course there are serious issues with interaction models, motion sickness, eye problems and so on. And to me those virtual worlds are also kind of stupid. VR does nothing that a phone call or cam chat can't. It's kind of like the hologram communicators in sci-fi movies. It looks cool, but adds nothing.

It's true that it's niche and expensive. Meta tried to make it mainstream during covid with the affordable Quest 2, only to back down on that when the Quest 3 came. It's indeed not for everyone, things like motion sickness and eye strain are real (I can't do long sessions myself either). However I have to disagree on the last part. Have you ever been immersed into a high quality virtual world on decent hardware (not just a silly game on Quest 1 level of graphics), that made you feel like actually being there rather than just watching a screen?

[Mylenium]

17 hours ago, ShaydDeGrai said:

As for the chicken and egg problem, I think the biggest issue is that they's been going after the wrong market. Augmented reality would be an easier nut to crack (though even Google's Glass ain't there yet)

Yeah, of course. They're already PR-spinning it and "course-correcting". Still, even that won't ever be the mass market they probably think it is in my opinion due to the technical limitations.

Mylenium

10 hours ago, JesseNight said:

Have you ever been immersed into a high quality virtual world on decent hardware (not just a silly game on Quest 1 level of graphics), that made you feel like actually being there rather than just watching a screen?

As long as I have to hold those stupid controllers to even navigate, it always totally breaks immersion. And let's be real: You cannot really "walk" in these environments, you have no proper haptic feedback and even with stunning visuals you can have poorly mixed sound. I haven't seen anything that would provide a fully wholesome experience, but of course I can't claim to have seen it all. Anyway, it's not gonna change now that companies are abandoning VR left and right. As far as I'm concerned VR at the consumer level is dead.

Mylenium

Edited Saturday at 08:19 AM by Mylenium

[JesseNight]

14 hours ago, Mylenium said:

As long as I have to hold those stupid controllers to even navigate, it always totally breaks immersion. And let's be real: You cannot really "walk" in these environments, you have no proper haptic feedback and even with stunning visuals you can have poorly mixed sound. I haven't seen anything that would provide a fully wholesome experience, but of course I can't claim to have seen it all. Anyway, it's not gonna change now that companies are abandoning VR left and right. As far as I'm concerned VR at the consumer level is dead.

That's been said many times in the past 15 years, but it's honestly never been as strong as it is now. It's not perfect for sure, we're not at a level to "plug in" our brain to a computer and have a total immersion (and that would be a scary thought tbh). Controllers remain a thing for now, but hand tracking is actively being improved. Haptic feedback exists. Devices to really walk on exist too but currently not attractive due to price and space requirement, but that's another thing that's still being worked on. As for audio, that's the same as any flat TV you buy: you get very basic audio included, and if you want good audio then buying separate high quality headphones or audio system is the way. Displays and lenses have improved a lot throughout the years. More wireless headsets have been appearing. More face & body tracking solutions.

Releases of new (affordable) VR sets that felt like a serious step up have been stagnant for a while, but R&D is still very much happening.

[ShaydDeGrai]

On 1/17/2026 at 5:35 PM, JesseNight said:

Releases of new (affordable) VR sets that felt like a serious step up have been stagnant for a while, but R&D is still very much happening.

The R&D certainly does continue.  As I mentioned earlier, VR (as a serious research topic) has been around since the 1960's.  My own doctorial work was on the creation of new programing paradigms to address the unique constraints of VR (virtual reality), AR (Augmented reality) and post-WIMP (window-icon-menu-pointer) applications.  I used to teach a course in this stuff as well as managing an advanced post-WIMP exploration lab.

Public interest in VR, however, is very much a multi-decade long cycle of excitement, consumerism, disillusionment and apathy. You give the masses stereoscopic CGI and surround sound and after the initial thrill wears off, they say how much cooler it would have been if the view would update when the move their head and if they were able to move things around by touching them.  R&D takes another decade to deliver head and hand tracking; the public flocks back only to eventually complain that the CGI they see in a $100M+ movie that took three years to render two hours of playback looks SO much better than the scene graph getting rendered at fifteen frames a second on their 640x480 resolution goggles.  R&D takes another decade to speed up the chips, improve the displayed and invent dedicated graphics processors; and people complain about all the wires; R&D comes up with wireless video streaming and optical tracking and the masses (after punching grandma ashes off the mantlepiece and walking into a wall) complain about foot tracking and the lack of meaningful haptic feedback. etc., etc.

I'm pretty sure we'll get there eventually (well, maybe not Star Trek Holodeck "there" but economically viable industrial, entertainment and personal application "there") but the gulf between what's available in the lab versus what a company can expect to market to the home consumer is just too damned wide right now.  Twenty years ago my lab had people in headset, pedaling around a virtual world on (essentially) stationary unicycles, tracking hand gestures (optically interpreting American Sign Language and finger spelling) in surround sound pods that could blow air in various directions and were mounded on a gimbal to let us change the direction of gravity in the user's inner ear.  It was cool; it was seriously immersive; and, it wasn't exactly state of the art even back then (though it was a serious pain to write control programs for).  Even so, with two decades of opportunities to improve the equipment that I cobbled together I still can't see one of those pods becoming a home consumer piece of equipment for the simple reason that it takes up too much space.  Maybe it would work in an industrial setting as a virtual amusement park "ride" in a mall, but I just don't see people getting rid of their sofas, coffee tables, consoles and TVs just so they have space for a VR pod in their living room and while subLOGIC's Flight Simulator for the Apple II was able to capture enough of the spirit of the task to become a commercial hit for those who didn't have room for an actual flight simulator in their garages forty years ago, we've seen time and time again that scaling back the VR experience to something that easily salable just leaves people with buyer's remorse.

And speaking of pending buyer's remorse (and honoring the fact that this ISN'T supposed to be a VR discussion thread) has anyone actually gotten their hands on this any of these "smart" brick enabled sets yet?  I think all of the "reviews" I've seen so far are all based on the official press release and videos, not hands on bricks.  Like Hollywood films, it makes me nervous when a studio doesn't preview the product to reviewers in advance of  opening it up to sales...

[JesseNight]

7 hours ago, ShaydDeGrai said:

Public interest in VR, however, is very much a multi-decade long cycle of excitement, consumerism, disillusionment and apathy. You give the masses stereoscopic CGI and surround sound and after the initial thrill wears off, they say how much cooler it would have been if the view would update when the move their head and if they were able to move things around by touching them.  R&D takes another decade to deliver head and hand tracking; the public flocks back only to eventually complain that the CGI they see in a $100M+ movie that took three years to render two hours of playback looks SO much better than the scene graph getting rendered at fifteen frames a second on their 640x480 resolution goggles.  R&D takes another decade to speed up the chips, improve the displayed and invent dedicated graphics processors; and people complain about all the wires; R&D comes up with wireless video streaming and optical tracking and the masses (after punching grandma ashes off the mantlepiece and walking into a wall) complain about foot tracking and the lack of meaningful haptic feedback. etc., etc.

Like everything, it's a constant progress but you must see it took a serious boost about 10 years ago, when Oculus began developing affordable consumer versions, and in a few years finally tackled the worst of the motion sickness issues people were having with early sets. I remember in 2018, there was a major boost in consumer VR sales which was about the same time I started trying it out. Another major wave happened in 2020 when people were at home due to covid lockdowns and Meta released its affordable wireless Quest 2 aiming at the big audience.
(note: I'm talking only about consumer grade products now)
Right now we're at a state that no VR set can do everything right. Best screens + lenses vs biggest fov vs smallest and lightest VR, and right now we seem to be a bit stuck that it is impossible to improve one without sacrificing on another. You're right that one day we'll probably get there.
 

7 hours ago, ShaydDeGrai said:

And speaking of pending buyer's remorse (and honoring the fact that this ISN'T supposed to be a VR discussion thread) has anyone actually gotten their hands on this any of these "smart" brick enabled sets yet?  I think all of the "reviews" I've seen so far are all based on the official press release and videos, not hands on bricks.  Like Hollywood films, it makes me nervous when a studio doesn't preview the product to reviewers in advance of  opening it up to sales...

Have to agree, no products out in the open is for me a big red flag and I'll never pre-order anymore, learned my lesson the hard way. Though my trust in big (commercial) reviewers is somewhat limited too, I rather wait til the non-profit small channels who purchased it themselves release their experiences.
If people weren't so impatient and businesses stopped exploiting that with limited supplies, we would just wait and see what we get after release... something I'm doing anyway, and that saved me a lot of wasting money on bad purchases. We may actually see some good products again if companies know their products are being tried before bought.

[Mylenium]

19 hours ago, ShaydDeGrai said:

And speaking of pending buyer's remorse (and honoring the fact that this ISN'T supposed to be a VR discussion thread) has anyone actually gotten their hands on this any of these "smart" brick enabled sets yet?  I think all of the "reviews" I've seen so far are all based on the official press release and videos, not hands on bricks.  Like Hollywood films, it makes me nervous when a studio doesn't preview the product to reviewers in advance of  opening it up to sales...

They come out in March here in Germany, so they're probably still embargoed. Due to the selective launch they may also require people to sign extra paperwork behind the scenes so they don't end up in unlicensed regions. I'm sure proper reviews will pop up soon enough in February.

Mylenium