Verizon in Minecraft

Cell phones are now a real thing in Minecraft

Verizon enabled cellular technology

A Minecraft cell phone that not only makes calls but also sends texts and lets you surf the web. No. This is not a fantasy but a real thing. 

Verizon has teamed up with Wieden+Kennedy and Blockworks to create a web application that allows you to make voice and video calls, send text and browse the Internet without leaving the game. 

Youtubers and Minecraft experts Sethbling and CaptainSparklez were reeled into promote the technology on their popular game streaming channels.

See them in action in the videos below

Seth Bling's Video

Captain Sparklez's Video

Verizon, while explaining the technology said, "In the world of Minecraft, almost everything is made of blocks. We’ve created a web application, Boxel, that translates real web pages and streaming video into blocks so they can be built on a Minecraft server in real time. Our server plugin uses Boxel-client to handle the communication between Minecraft and the real world as translated by the web application. We’ve open-sourced these libraries — so if you can write a little code, you can try it for yourself."

Things you can do from within the game

Video Calls

Using their in-game phone, players can send and receive video calls. In the game, you’ll see your friends’ faces translated into Minecraft blocks in real time. On the other end of the call, you’ll be able to see the player’s avatar moving around.

Text/MMS

Players can create a selfie stick by combining their in-game phone with a stick. By swinging the stick, they can take a selfie and send it to a real-world phone via MMS.


Web Browsing

We built a browser that connects directly to the Internet and translates real web pages into blocks so we can show them on the screen of your in-game phone (which is also made of blocks). Players can load any page from the Internet and scroll to view the whole thing.

Visit Boxel and Boxel-client on GitHub for more documentation to help you get started.

Original Article: Verizon on Github