This is where I normally make a funny pun about calls being blocked but holy shit this is a working video call in Minecraft. This is it. This is how the real world ceases to exist. Block by block. Yes it's from US behemoth Verizon - someone in their marketing team deserves a serious Christmas bonus - but this is just incredible.
Shown off by Minecraft YouTuber Captain Sparklez, the phone can browse the internet, make calls and even create a selfie stick to send a picture of your Minecraft avatar to a real world phone. Verizon worked with 'Minecraft architects' BlockWorks to create the in game masterwork and video calls manage to somehow translate onto blocks in real time. But how do they do it? "In the world of Minecraft, almost everything is made of blocks," explains the Verizon site.
"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." Follow the link to the main site and it even talks you through working with the application. Or just check out the video above and marvel.
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