Lego unveils tech-filled Smart Bricks

Lego has unveiled Sensible Bricks – tech-filled variations of its small constructing blocks – which it says will deliver units to life with sound, gentle and response to motion.

Nonetheless, the brand new product vary is inflicting unease amongst play specialists, who say it dangers undermining what makes Lego particular for youngsters in an more and more digital world.

Introduced on the Shopper Electronics Present (CES) 2026 in Las Vegas, the Danish toymaker’s Sensible Play system introduces new digital parts to the basic plastic blocks.

Lego says its new tech-enabled merchandise, launching in March with a brand new Star Wars set, are its “most revolutionary innovation” in practically 50 years.

However Josh Golin, govt director of kids’s wellbeing group Fairplay, believes Sensible Bricks “undermine what was as soon as nice about Legos” – harnessing kids’s personal creativeness throughout play.

“As anybody who has ever watched a toddler play with old-school Legos is aware of, kids’s Lego creations already do transfer and make noises via the ability of kids’s imaginations,” he informed the BBC.

“However with the discharge of Sensible Bricks, Lego is taking play out of the arms of kids and placing it into the tiny sensors of those so-called ‘good’ units.”

Andrew Manches, professor of kids and know-how on the College of Edinburgh, agreed the great thing about Lego lay in “the liberty to create, re-create, and adapt easy blocks into countless tales powered by kids’s creativeness”.

However he additionally welcomed Lego’s efforts to combine bodily and digital play with instruments that react to the way in which kids work together with its Sensible Play merchandise.

Julia Goldin, the corporate’s chief product and advertising officer, beforehand informed the BBC it seen digital know-how as a chance to “increase bodily play and bodily constructing”.

“We do not take a look at the digital world as a menace,” she stated – including its good vary weaves interactivity “seamlessly” with its bodily merchandise.

Lego says its Sensible Bricks can sense movement, place and distance, permitting the fashions to reply in varied methods throughout play.

Measuring 2×4, the brick itself comprises sensors, lights, a small sound synthesiser, an accelerator and a custom-made silicon chip enabling it to detect motion and react to it.

However it’s designed for use with Sensible Minifigures and Sensible Tags tiles – two extra merchandise making up Lego’s Sensible Play System.

Equally tailored from present Lego parts, these possess digital identifiers triggering completely different sounds or reactions after they detect and work together with one another.

As an example, when tried out by the BBC at CES, a Lego birthday cake recognised when its “candles” had been blown out – sounding a cheer and a cheerful birthday track.

In the meantime, a Lego helicopter made whooshing sounds when moved or rotated, with its Sensible Brick lighting up crimson upon crashing.

Tom Donaldson, head of Lego’s Inventive Play Lab, stated the tech supposed to reply to kids’s actions and complement the way in which they naturally play.

He stated the Sensible Brick’s reactions to responses would “hopefully encourage and shock the consumer to maintain them persevering with to play”.

“We’re constructing a platform that we wish to final for a few years,” he stated.

Prof Manches informed the BBC decreased value and dimension of parts has “enabled extra toymakers to combine digital know-how seamlessly into a variety of toys”.

However he added regardless of thrilling innovation, issues stay concerning the safety and privateness of latest and rising good toys for youngsters – notably these which combine AI.

“The secret’s to us all to stay critically reflective of the design of those toys, and to pay a lot consideration to how they affect kids’s on a regular basis lives,” he stated.

It isn’t the primary time Lego has dabbled in digital experimentation or sought to attraction to more and more on-line audiences.

Since 2017 it has launched augmented actuality apps and experiences letting individuals play with computer-generated fashions layered over their environment.

By way of collaborations with online game publishers resembling Nintendo and Fortnite-maker Epic Video games it has additionally regarded to attraction to followers of trending video games or new launches – releasing a Tremendous Mario Minifigure in 2020 with a tiny show display.

Lego chief govt Niels B. Christiansen stated within the agency’s 2024 annual report it had accelerated spending on digital know-how as a “strategic space” for the corporate.