Brickit is a new AR app that will scan your old pile of Lego and tell you what you can build

Next year, Lego will celebrate 90 years since it was founded in a Danish carpentry workshop back in 1932. Almost a century later, it remains one of the most popular kids toys across the world and it still takes up huge chunks of the toy section in many stores. Over time, Lego has moved further and further away from the simple sets of bricks that it became known for. These days, the elaborate sets that you can build are composed of thousands of pieces that come in all shapes and sizes and it's easy to be overwhelmed by what’s on offer.

For many of us however, Lego is a big box containing a jumble of random bricks, each belonging to structures that were dismantled long ago. With the instruction manuals long gone, building more than a simple house feels like a daunting prospect. But what if you could scan all of the random pieces and be told exactly what you could make with them? This was the dream for the team behind Brickit, a new app that is inspiring kids and adults alike to build new creations from their old Lego. The process is very straightforward: simply lay out your bricks, point your camera at the unruly heap, and let Brickit do all the work for you. It will scan each individual piece, identify it, and then figure out which of Lego’s many sets you can build from what you have on hand. It will even tell you which bricks are missing.

As well as identifying the various bits in the pile, it will also provide you with illustrations of them in a similar vein to the official Lego instruction manuals. If you’re unsure of where to find these pieces in the undoubtedly huge pile, fear not because the app will then highlight each one in the original photo. As a result, building the proposed sets – assuming you have the correct bricks – becomes a relatively quick and easy task. Though, if you don’t have the right pieces to make any of the sets, you can attempt them anyway, substituting missing pieces for others that you have in your arsenal. This stage might require a bit of thinking outside the box but, as Lego’s original tagline goes: “Just Imagine…”

Brickit is currently available to download on the App Store, with an Android version coming autumn 2021.