LEGO’s ‘Smart Brick’ Gives Its Plastic Bricks the Power to See, Hear and Feel

LEGO just made its most ambitious showing ever at CES, the world’s largest consumer electronics trade show—an unusual venue for a toy giant, and a telling one. At this year’s CES in Las Vegas, LEGO unveiled a screen-less device called the “SMART Brick,” a bid to bring a myriad of senses to its silent, incredibly precise plastic bricks.

The SMART Brick is a standard two-by-four LEGO brick (1.6 cm by 3.2 cm) with a tiny, custom ASIC chip embedded inside. That chip allows the brick to recognize distance, color and motion, and even to interpret the “personalities” of thousands of LEGO minifigures.

The brick sits at the center of LEGO’s new “SMART Play” system, a platform designed to make physical play more interactive and fun. It’s meant to be a system “where technology seamlessly brings LEGO sets to life, responding to actions with appropriate sounds and behaviours, allowing for a truly responsive play experience,” according to LEGO. The Danish company is billing SMART Play as its most significant product innovation in 50 years, since the introduction of the minifigure in the late 1970s.

The SMART Brick, small enough to be integrated in any LEGO model, packs in far more than its size suggests. It includes responsive lights, a color-recognition scanner to sense its surroundings, a sound synthesizer capable of producing a wide range of effects, and a built-in accelerometer that tracks how the brick moves through the air in real-time.

The SMART brick works in conjunction with SMART tags and SMART minifigures. A SMART Tag is a flat, 2×2 studless tile embedded with a unique digital ID that tells a nearby SMART Brick what role it should assume in a given context. SMART minifigures, without a visible tag, also contain their own unique digital IDs that encode a character’s “personality” and guide how the SMART Brick should behave when that figure is nearby.

During a demo at CES, Tom Donaldson, senior vice president and head of Creative Play Lab at the LEGO Group, placed a SMART Brick on a panel divided into four colors: red, green, blue and yellow. As the brick moved across the surface, it lit up to match the color beneath it.

“When you put that in a LEGO model, the model knows the world around it,” Donaldson said. “It knows it’s in a water bayou; it knows it’s in a jungle bayou because it’s green; maybe it knows it’s in a red fire engine over a blue police car.”

In another demonstration, Donaldson attached a SMART Brick to a LEGO yellow duck and moved it through different positions—splashing, sleeping, even flying to test whether the duck approved. The brick responded with sounds that conveyed different emotions: contentment, snoring, irritation and more.

The SMART Brick can also sense proximity. When another brick moves closer or farther away, it reacts by changing its lights or emitting sounds. When placed on or near a SMART Tag, it instantly assumes whatever role the tag assigns it—a police car, a duck, a helicopter and so on.

SMART minifigures, meanwhile, react uniquely to their environments through distinct sounds, moods and behaviors. Those reactions are played through the speaker inside a nearby SMART Brick; the minifigures themselves don’t produce sound, but instead trigger the brick to do so on their behalf.

LEGO SMART Play is set to officially launch on March 1. Preorders for an all-in-one LEGO Star Wars SMART Play set begin on Jan. 9.