US telecommunications giants Verizon have been working hard to make sure Minecraft users can do some (and only some) of the things they can do on their real-life phones on their phones in-game equivalents. The outcome of all their hard work? Web browsing, video calls and sending MMS are all now possible within Minecraft.
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Minecrafting YouTubers CaptainSparklez and SethBling have already demoed the beta and the results are seriously cool, if a little pointless. As a neat addition, Verizon have made it so if players combine a stick with their in-game phone they’ll even have a selfie stick to obnoxiously wave around and send pictures with.
Working alongside a team of expert Minecraft architects, Verizon created Boxel, a web app that translates video streaming and web pages into blocks. The translation happens in real time, making video calls from within Minecraft possible. And the ordering of takeaway pizza.
The new features haven’t been rolled out in full just yet, but if you’re handy with coding you can get this unbelievably meta setup in your game too by heading to Boxel; the library and its client are both open source.