Craft Your Own VR Experience With MAZE by Seedling
The Virtual Reality craze is everywhere these days. It’s the hot new thing, and lots of creators of VR headsets are even making kid-friendly games and experiences that really kick butt. Unfortunately, the price tag of a VR headset is far from kid-friendly. Most kids we know don’t have tons kind of cash saved up from their allowances, leaving them wishing and dreaming about VR, something that’s supposed to be all about getting hands on and experiencing for yourself.
The good news? Our buds at Seedling have solved that problem by creating MAZE, a line of craft kits, toys, and apps that work together to give you a super cool VR experience at a very reasonable price. You’re definitely going to want to ask Santa for this one!
MAZE by Seedling is broken down into a few different pieces, each fully playable on their own, but come to life in an even more awesome way when you use them all together. They were kind enough to send us our very own kit, so now we’re fully prepared to tell you guys all about it! (Spoiler alert: It’s REALLY cool!)
Design Your Own Marble Maze:
At first glance, this may look like your ordinary labyrinth marble maze, but you actually get to take on the role of game designer and build your own mazes from scratch. The kit comes with a gorgeous wooden marble maze box, 3 marbles, paper grids, 45 wall building blocks, as well as adhesive tape and start/end markers – everything you need to build and re-build epic, challenging mazes.
These kits also come with a cardboard VR viewer, which when paired with the MAZE app, can bring your maze to life in full VR glory. All you need to do is build your maze, pop your phone into the VR headset, and scan your creation – and within minutes you’ll be walking through a life-sized version of your maze, trying to find power-ups and avoid getting hit by giant marbles.
We had so much fun plotting out our mazes, playing them, and then customizing them even further in the app with sounds, obstacles, and even selfies! This whole kit is just $59.99, meaning you can finally have the VR experience you’ve always wanted without breaking the piggy bank. Plus – it’s pretty educational to learn how to craft your own tricky maze, so maybe mom and dad will even buy it for you!
DIY Virtual Reality Viewer:
If you’re more of the crafty type, you might be thinking “a cardboard VR viewer is perfect for doodling on!”, and you’d be right! But with the DIY Virtual Reality Viewer kits from Seedling, you can craft something even cooler than that. There’s 3 types available: The Dark Side, Stitch & Style, and Modern Art. The Dark Side kit lets you embrace your inner edge by providing you with dark leather, black glitter glue, and mirrored paper to create a really bold viewer that channels Darth Vader or even Batman.
Modern Art lets you get crafty and colorful with all sorts of stencils and construction paper, letting you create a mosaic of awesome that’s worthy of hanging in a museum after you’re done. Stitch & Style is probably our favorite though – providing you with yarn and circular panels that you can create embroidered patterns on to stick to your viewer and make it really stand out. Who said VR headsets had to be boring? Each of these kits are $19.99 and can be paired with the MAZE app. (We also tried ours with the View-Master app and it totally worked too!)
Design Your Own Headphones:
Your VR experience wouldn’t be complete unless you could hear it, so Seedling made sure you were covered by letting you craft your own pair of headphones! There are two kits to choose from – Street Art and Punk Rock.
The Punk Rock kit is the one Seedling sent us, and we were pretty excited about it. The kit comes with a solid white pair of headphones, a DIY-ers dream! It also comes with adhesive fur, silver studs, mirrored paper, and some acrylic paint to help you channel the crafty rockstar who lives inside you. If Street Art is more your thing, you’ll love using the colorful craft markers, paint sprays, and colored paper to give life to your headphones.
Once your headphones are ready, plug them into your device to hear the incredible music and sound effects as you make your way through the mazes in the app or just listen to your favorite playlist! These kits are $29.99.
MAZE App:
Even if you don’t have any of the kits listed above, you can still download and play Seedling’s MAZE app. It’s free to download from the App Store and there’s a bunch of different starter mazes that you can play through and customize. This app really comes to life when you or someone you know is able to pair the marble maze and VR headsets with the app, though.
Actually experiencing a full sized version of the maze you created yourself (and adding in sneaky hidden passages and riddles to stump your friends) is a pretty awesome experience. You can even invite friends to race through your maze by pairing your devices all together.
All in all we really loved our MAZE experience, and we’re pretty sure you guys will too. It’s perfect for a VR beginner who’s just looking to try it out and it’s great for anyone who loves crafting, tinkering, and building. If you’ve logged countless hours in Minecraft or spend your weekends building LEGO sets, you’ll probably be really into MAZE. Everything about it is just a really cool hands-on experience.
We loved that each piece of the MAZE Starter Kit we were sent had to be assembled or crafted in some way before using it. It really draws you in and gives you a sense of pride and ownership. The individual kits as well as MAZE Starter Kits are now available on Seedling.com! Now that you know all about MAZE, it’s time to get crafting and step into a VR world of your own!
