Blog of Josh Hall

I’ve seen the app come up in my social media feed and I was strongly pessimistic. After a few people sent me the link, I figured I should do a first hand testimonial and send them that for when people send me it in the future but also if anyone else is curious about it.

From the ad and my understanding of AI recognition, I anticipated the app to work best for simple bricks. The more complex the element, the less likely it would be accurately recognized. That isn’t to say it’s a lost cause, just a lot of work to get where people want this to be.

The second thought I had was even if it were able to recognize a lot of pieces, it’s going to take a lot of work to get an inventory of builds that would be possible. They’d probably throw in a few simple builds that can be any color to simplify the matching and increase the variety.

So, let’s get to it…I was just going to open one of the large bins I have and see what it can do. To its credit, I skipped the first 2 steps of laying everything flat and removing all the big pieces.

So I snapped a pic, and here is what it looked like:

It has a cool recognition visualization process that highlights all the pieces it detects all around the collection. That was fun to watch. After that ran for a few seconds, I was, of course, give. The option to sign up for the pro/paid version. It appears there are more instructions with the pro version, but we’re not going to be building Hogwarts or anything intricate here.

With 265 bricks identified, here are my build options:

I am very underwhelmed. Seeing the wheels triggers me to think that it didn’t even detect wheels, so I looked deeper into what it did find.

I found inaccuracies in the 265 it found. It has a nice interface to tell you where in the collection to find it. That could be useful for finding that 1 piece, but in the time it takes to pull your phone out and focus a picture, you’d probably find anything you were looking for.

I think the real limitation here is wanting to keep the interface of an app on a phone. The LEGO fan community has been waiting for someone to invent a table top sorter, and this is part of the equation. You could sell a box that you’d dump pieces in, it would shuffle elements to a conveyor belt, identify a piece, and kick it out to one of a few openings. they could market different sizes of the box and pro features would get you regular inventory updates or firmware.

I don’t think we’ll ever get anywhere, for hardcore fans or for introductory builders, with pictures from a phone and a curated layout of pieces. May as well just use your imagination. It’d probably look AT LEAST as good as a 10 piece rocket.

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