It’s the frustration of many a designer: You grow up sketching and making with your hands, only to find yourself 20 years later spending the day in front of a glowing screen. The reality is, building in 3-D requires doing a lot of 2-D work first.

But what if you could build your design in real life, then tweak it virtually? That’s the idea behind Lego X, which uses networked plastic bricks to build digital 3-D files.

Lego X comes from the same team of designers behind Gravity Sketch, the bonkers Oculus Rift program that lets you draw in 3-D using augmented reality.

Lego X taps something more basic: Our desire to play with toys.

The underside of each brick (they’re Duplo, not Lego, but Duplo X doesn’t have the same ring) has a sensor and a gyroscope, which allow the toys to communicate wirelessly with each other and the software. As you stack one brick atop another, a rendering appears on your tablet in real time. Once you have your digital file, you can modify it to remove the nubs from the bricks, smooth corners, add windows and make other mods to ensure your design look less like blocks and more like a skyscraper.

You might wonder if it isn’t faster to simply design with software from the start. Yes, in some cases. But the Gravity team believes there’s much to be gained from being able to actually build something.

Gravity is still pondering how to build custom electronic components that can be added to the Lego blocks available in any toy store, but this will require additional time and money.

But Lego X offers compelling glimpse of what’s possible. Just imagine how incredibly cool—and useful—something like Lego’s Architecture Studio will be once your ideas can be manipulated in a computer.

A Lego Set for Budding Architects, With No Instructions
http://www.wired.com/2013/08/a-lego-set-with-no-instructions-for-budding-architects/

The Lego Movie opened with record box office in the US and, after clever TV advertising, is sure to build a good audience on its UK release this week.

Most recently, the Danish company partnered with Google to create virtual Lego which can be built online.

But perhaps the app, called Build with Chrome, isn’t exactly aimed at the little ones.