Ukrainian startup Pixio makes magnetic building blocks

A Ukrainian startup may have created the successor to the hugely popular Lego and Meccano toys.

The startup has come up with an ingenious toy made of small plastic cubes with built-in magnets that allow them to stick together. The toy, and the company that designed it, are both called Pixio.

The team hopes their creation will appeal everyone who loves technology, design, and most of all – computer games, including Super Mario and indie hit (and now Microsoft-owned) Minecraft.

The colorful 8×8-millimeter cubes weigh just over 1 gram each, and can be attached to the sides of other blocks by magnetic attraction. The polarity of the six magnets inside the blocks are so arranged that the cubes can be connected to each other in any configuration. The cubes come in 16 colors.

“We chose the ideal shape – a cube, like a pixel in the digital world. At the same time, this is a most fundamental, absolutely symmetrical polyhedron, with an equal number of faces. It is perfect both mathematically and aesthetically,” the startup’s blurb reads.

Pixio promises to develop an app with manuals that will show users how to put together models using the blocks – from Pokemons’ Pikachu, to Steve, the hero of Minecraft.

Moreover, the app will allow users to model themselves in varying levels of detail using Pixio blocks.

The startup has launched a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter, looking to collect $75,000. And even though the campaign itself started only three days ago and still has 35 days to go, 433 backers have already supported the idea with $61,000.

According to the company’s road map, it will start shipping the constructor sets in August 2017, manufacturing them throughout the first two months of the summer.

The Kickstarter campaign allows backers to pre-order from 50 to 3,200 building “pixels.” For each set, Pixio will include manuals to show how to create characters of various levels of sophistication. Currently Pixio is working on manuals for hundreds of characters.

Kyiv Post staff writer Denys Krasnikov can be reached at [email protected].