Lego has yet another line of toys that connect to an AR smartphone app, and this time it’s musical. Vidiyo is a TikTok-style social media app aimed at 7–10 year olds, letting kids make and share music videos using scanned Lego minifigures and printed tiles called “Beat Bits”, to create effects and remix songs.

Users create a three-piece band (with a randomly generated name for safety), and make short music videos to a variety of popular songs. Adding the effects of the Beat Bits may make the characters dance, turn into chickens, or get zapped by aliens. At the end of the recording process users are encouraged to cut the one-minute video down to 5, 10 or 20 seconds and share to the public social feed.

Every video is moderated by a human to make sure it doesn’t contain any people, identifying information or anything inappropriate. Although Lego is keeping mum on how many human moderators it has, it aims to get each video through moderation in 15 minutes, which is extremely ambitious.

On the other hand, those safety features might be what holds Vidiyo back. TikTok allows for all kinds of videos and creativity in different circumstances, which is what keeps it fresh and entertaining. Vidiyo relies heavily on the collection of a (currently) limited number of Lego toys and is purely for music videos, with only one new song introduced each week. It’s great that it’s safe, that the majority of the figures are $6, and there are no plans to include in-app purchases. But the limitations might mean kids get bored and move on relatively quickly.

This is far from Lego’s first foray into augmented reality (AR). Previous attempts have included Ultra Agents (which you don’t remember for a reason) and Hidden Side (which had really cool sets, but the app didn’t take off). Its last electronic hybrid collection was Lego Super Mario, which doesn’t include AR capabilities.

Unfortunately, during the beta release — which is the only time I’ve had with Vidiyo — the app has been extremely slow even with a high-end internet connection and phone. At the time of writing, opening the app and accessing the social feed took 35 seconds, and to get from the creation page took longer than a minute.

The wait has halved since I first started playing with the app, so there’s hope things might improve further, but I can easily see kids who are curious but not yet invested getting bored and not picking it up again. That’s going to be a challenge for developers to fix in the short term if they want Vidiyo to have longevity.

I love the idea of Vidiyo, if not the spelling of the name, and already I’ve seen some really creative videos where people have gone beyond just filming the figures on their floor and have taken them to interesting places in the real world, or built them a stage from Lego. There is so much potential here, but it will be up to kids look to past the limitations and help Vidiyo achieve it.