There is no shortage of incredible contraptions created within Minecraft, but Verizon Communications Inc seems to have taken things a step further by building a fully functioning cell phone within the Minecraft game world. Some of the features supported by Verizon’s Minecraft phone include video chat (with predictably blocky results), text/MMS, and extremely low-res web browsing.

“Believe it or not, until recently it was impossible to order a pizza from Minecraft,” Verizon joked in a post on github.io.  “In fact, you couldn’t make a phone call, send a text message or browse the web from the game even if you built a phone.”

“Verizon endeavored to solve these problems by building a phone in Minecraft that can actually connect to the real world without leaving the game. With the help of Wieden+Kennedy and BlockWorks, we built custom functionality that lets players browse the Internet, make video calls and create a selfie stick to send an MMS selfie to a friend.”

To get the web browsing to work on the in-game phone, Verizon created a custom web application called Boxel that translates web pages and streaming video into individual Minecraft blocks.

“Our server plugin uses Boxel-client to handle the communication between Minecraft and the real world as translated by the web application,” Verizon explained. “We’ve open-sourced these libraries — so if you can write a little code, you can try it for yourself.”

You can access the full code and documentation for both Boxel and Boxel-client on github.

You can also watch a video of Verizon’s phone, as demonstrated by well known Minecraft Let’s Player CaptainSparklez, below:

Images courtesy of Verizon