Even technology correspondents need a vacation day. Over Fourth of July, I visited Legoland California with my family. While my nearly 3-year-old grandson loved the water park and rides, I was fascinated by the miniature buildings in the area called Miniland.
I got a behind-the-scenes look at what goes into creating the villages and the technology tools that are used.
The miniature replicas of famous buildings and landmarks are an eye-opener for future engineers and architects or those who are just fascinated by miniature models. Thousands of buildings, people, animals and vehicles are constructed from more than 24 million Lego blocks. All the blocks are identical to those available in stores; they have not been altered or painted and are available at Lego's store in the park, the largest Lego outlet in the country. (Some blocks are coated with a clear UV inhibitor to keep them from fading under the California sun.)
The reproductions of American landmarks represent seven geographical areas. They range from a New England farm with tiny animated chickens and pigs; the Daytona International Speedway; Washington, D.C.'s monuments, the White House and Capitol building; a New Orleans' Mardi Gras celebration; New York City's Times Square, the Statue of Liberty and Empire State Building; and California with San Francisco's Victorian houses, hilly streets, cable cars and the Golden Gate Bridge.
The newest addition, opened this past spring, is a replica of the Las Vegas Strip with many of its famous hotels, a miniature wedding chapel, an Elvis impersonator and a working monorail. Las Vegas was a huge undertaking that took three years to develop. It's built using more than 2 million Lego bricks and required 16,000 man-hours, all done on location in Carlsbad.
I visited with Eric Hunter, one of Legoland's model makers, who was part of the team that created Las Vegas, and toured the model shop where much of the work is done. The process of building the Las Vegas village started with Hunter and other model makers visiting Las Vegas and determining which hotels to include.
Hunter explained they chose hotels with identifying characteristics, including the pyramid-shaped Luxor, the Excalibur, Treasure Island and the Mirage. Elements of other hotels such as the Paris' Eiffel Tower were also added.
As they roamed Las Vegas, they took hundreds of photos of the hotels. This allowed them to create a panoramic view of the facades of each hotel made up of hundreds of photos mounted together.The next step was to get aerial views of the hotels in order to layout the entire area. That's been a challenge on past projects, but this time they used Google Earth to get amazingly detailed aerial views of the hotels and the strip.
The next step was designing the buildings. Surprisingly, they are not scaled replicas of the actual buildings. In order to make the buildings more approachable to visitors, the scale is larger at street level than the upper floors.
A 1/20 life-size scale is used on the lower few floors with the rest at 1/40 scale. That allows more detail to be provided along the lower floors of the building, the part we see as we pass by the real buildings at street level.
The model makers then import their photographic panorama into Photoshop using Dell PCs. They purposely use a very low-resolution mode to highly pixelate their design to match the size of the smallest Lego block, 5 by 5 by 6 units deep with four units equal to one-quarter inch.
Next they use a PC CAD program, Rhino, to develop the details of each building. The challenge is to create as much detail as possible using the relatively course blocks. Through experience they're able to create illusions that make rough objects appear incredibly realistic as soon as you step back to a normal viewing distance.
What other technologies are utilized? The buildings and streetlights are illuminated using fiber optics. Moving cars, trucks, cable cars and other vehicles are automated from beneath the roadways. Each car has a motor and rechargeable batteries that are controlled by programmed radio devices under the roadways and at a central command center. Vehicles occasionally pause and recharge themselves for a few moments using contacts located along the roads.
I came away from my visit wanting to build a replica of my home. I could easily capture an aerial image from Google Earth and buy the thousands of blocks I would need to create it. Come to think of it, that's exactly what Legoland hopes it will inspire visitors to do.
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