The LEGO Group and Snapchat have a rich history of partnership and innovation, rooted in their shared values of creativity and play. In the summer of 2024, the LEGO Group approached Snapchat with an ambitious brief: reintroduce play to an adult audience in a whole new way via AR.
Idea
With adults spending up to 7 hours on their phones daily, and 80% of that time spent passively scrolling, we saw a unique opportunity to transform downtime into playtime with the always-on AR game, Bricktacular.
Bricktacular brought the real-life experience of building with LEGO bricks to phones and Snapchat’s latest AR wearable, Spectacles, through innovative Snap AR tech.
Innovation
Players unlocked the infinite building potential of 10 LEGO bricks, mastered new challenges, let their imagination run wild with Free Play mode, then shared their creations with the world.
Brickatcular also became the first branded experience on the newest version of Spectacles. Players build with both hands, control bricks with their voice and instead of building on a 3D platform, players build directly on real-world surfaces.
We pushed the limits of Snap AR’s hand tracking to capture the tactile feel of LEGO play. To achieve this, we conducted multiple rounds of user testing across different demographics to perfect the range of hand movements for grabbing and placing bricks. Using predictive analytics, we enhanced brick placement, guiding users to build with precision. Our goal wasn’t to reinvent building with LEGO bricks but to show that the power of play can exist anywhere—physical or digital—through the LEGO system-in-play.
Ultimately, we used AR to bridge imagination and reality, encouraging more play and building interactions for an adult audience. The result: over 1 million unique creations and more than 8 million minutes of play (and counting).
The press loved it, too—The Atlantic, TechCrunch, Fast Company, and many other tech and trade publications covered the launch, cementing the next frontier of digital play for adults.
