In 2020/21, while furloughed from my job with Seeper, I was fortunate enough to be invited to work with Near Light on a new stage of LEGO: Vidiyo

I’m not sure exactly how much can be said as yet as some parts were still under NDA, but I’ll add a few notes and assets now, and update as I can.

The Project

In a nutshell, Vidiyo is a smartphone-based AR experience combining digital music, audio and content with real-world LEGO builds, via the phone’s camera. The video above shows pretty well how this works.

When I joined the team LEGO and Near Light had already completed stage 1, and were looking to develop the next stage which was working with established recording artists and, as part of that, creating entire digital environment takeovers reflective of each artist. It was my job to create these video backgrounds.

Concept stage

The idea was to use 360 degree videos to create a completely immersive world. As this had only been cursorily explored, the first job was to create some worlds and see how well they worked.

A few sketches and notes came first, vaguely how the world would work and some of the details of animated elements within it. These notes were based on the covers of Imagine Dragons created by Beeple, though they were not to be become one of the four selected artists

Overall, there was a fairly long development and quite a lot of different work. When it come to sorting through my archives it transpires that I have no strong recollection of what was final, and what order things were done in. As the whole product was eventually discontinued before any of this was released, I’ll just share the pieces I like.

Here are some bioforms and terrain for an alien world;

Some work in progress shots of various worlds;

360 video backgrounds

Here are a selection of 360 videos, from early, unused concept to final(ish).

Additional work

As well as the backgrounds, I also did a little development on “deco-plates”, the idea being that users could scan in their LEGO created patterns, and these would add an additional dimension to the more advanced stage sets.

More to come on 16/03/23…..