Before the days of fancy JavaScript games, LEGOS ruled many an afternoon of our childhood. Build With Chrome is a collaborative project between Google and LEGO that allows visitors to reminisce on these days without the needless anxiety of “discovering” a stray block with one’s bare foot.
Getting started is very simple, or you can also enter into a discovery mode to see popular creations that others have built. The keyboard shortcuts greatly help move the process along. I appreciated the thought behind the space+drag shortcut to rotate the scene (akin to many 3D modeling applications), but the easing animation that is applied while doing so takes some getting used to.
To save you from attempting to deconstruct the inner workings on your own, OutsideOfSociety (@oosmoxiecode), a developer at North Kingdom, walks us through the planning, execution, and optimization of the application in this blog entry.
Build With Chrome is a fun little playground for sparking up the old LEGO-driven imagination. On a personal level, I was sorely let down back the lack of LEGO people. After all, what good is a house or building if there’s no smiling yellow man standing on top of it and threatening you with a lightsaber?
Build With Chrome by North Kingdom and Mark