Good question! While we have great respect for our ancestors, the L3D Cube is significantly different than other cubes you may have seen before. Here's how:

1. No soldering required. The 8x8x8 L3D Cube only takes 30 minutes to assemble, as opposed to the 100+ hours required for other cubes you might have seen before.

2. The L3D Cube uses RGB LEDs that are capable of displaying 16.7 million colors for every LED in each cube. Many other cubes are single color.

3. It's bigger - way bigger. The L3D Cubes have far more LEDs than most LED cubes out there. Our Regular Cube is an 8x8x8 LED array, or 512 LEDs, and our Really Big Cube is a 16x16x16 array, or 4096 LEDs. Cubes this size have never before been available to the general public. This allows for genuine 3D graphics which aren't possible with the smaller LED cubes.

4. The L3D Cubes are all WiFi connected and easily updatable. The more people that get cubes, the better everyone's cubes become. Most other LED cubes are static - typically they only run a preset arrangement of programs that can't be changed.

5. Each L3D Cube can run new apps from CubeTube without any programming. This is the first time there's been an app store for 3D LED cubes.

6. Because the L3D Cubes are WiFi-connected, they can also be arranged into larger arrays without any additional wiring.

7. The L3D Cube uses surface-mount individually addressable LEDs - we believe this is the first time this type of LED has been used in a 3D LED cube. This greatly simplifies the assembly process and also reduces flicker. It also means the cubes can be made to burn insanely bright (for the Burning Man crowd out there).

8. Each cube includes a microphone in the cube, for music visualizations.

9. We're building a community of people creating and sharing apps for LED cubes - previously people might spend a couple months soldering together a cube on their own, but then they wouldn't be able to easily share the apps they developed on their cubes. That's about to change for both L3D Cubes and any LED cubes out there, once we launch CubeTube on December 25 (beta for backers).

A surface-mounted individually-addressable RGB LED called the WS2812B. Made by Worldsemi.

Yes.

Yes! We show a short clip in the video of four cubes in an array. They aren't wired together - they are each just connected to WiFi and are wirelessly connected into a larger array. Check it out! http://goo.gl/MhUlqs

NO! The cube will start to play the pre-loaded demo loop once you plug it in - zero setup. Then, if you'd like to download new apps to your cube, you just need to connect your cube to WiFi - no programming is required.

Of course, it's great if you want to create new apps for your cube and other people's cubes around the world! Here's a starter guide Alex wrote: http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Draw-Sweet-3D-Graphics-for-LED-cubes/

We're running the cubes through three stages of LED tests before shipping (will detail in an upcoming update), so we anticipate your cubes will work without a single LED failure for years. That said, it's a new product, and it would be arrogant of us to not build in a contingency plan for our backers.

So, we're shipping every L3D Cube with an extra LED reed (including 8 mounted RGB LEDs for the 8x8x8 cube and 16 mounted RGB LEDs for the 16x16x16 cube). If anyone's cube gets a burned out LED, the top of the cube can be opened, the LED reed with the failure pulled out, and the replacement LED reed plugged in. It's a 3-5 minute repair that only requires a screwdriver.

Ringo.