LEGO recently made its biggest-ever debut at CES, the world’s largest electronics trade show—an unusual place for a toy giant, and a telling one. At this year’s CES in Las Vegas, LEGO unveiled a screenless device called the “SMART Brick,” an attempt to bring a host of sensors 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 small, custom ASIC chip embedded inside. That chip allows the brick to recognize distance, color and movement, and even interpret the “personality” of thousands of LEGO minifigures.
The brick is at the center of LEGO’s new “SMART Play” system, a platform designed to make physical play interactive and fun. It’s intended to be a system “where technology brings LEGO sets to life, responding to actions with appropriate sounds and behaviors, allowing for a truly responsive play experience,” according to LEGO. The Danish company bills SMART Play as its most important product innovation in 50 years, since the introduction of the minifigure in the late 1970s.
The SMART Brick, small enough to be assembled into any LEGO model, packs a lot more than its size suggests. It includes responsive lights, a color vision scanner to sense your surroundings, a sound synthesizer capable of producing multiple 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 the adjacent SMART Brick what role it should play in a given context. SMART minifigures, apart from a visual marker, also contain their own unique digital IDs that include the character’s “personality” and dictate how the SMART Brick should behave when that figure is nearby.
During a demo at CES, Tom Donaldson, senior vice president and head of the Creative Play Lab at the LEGO Group, placed the SMART Brick on a panel divided into four colors: red, green, blue and yellow. As the brick moved over the ground, it would light up to match the color beneath it.
“If you put that in a LEGO model, the model is aware of the world around it,” Donaldson said. “It knows it’s in a water area; it knows it’s in a forest because it’s green; it probably knows it’s in a red fire engine on top of a blue police car.”
In one demonstration, Donaldson attached a SMART Brick to a yellow LEGO duck and moved it to different locations—splashing, sleeping, and flying—to test whether the duck agreed. The brick responded with sounds conveying different emotions: satisfaction, snoring, anger and so on.
The SMART Brick can also sense proximity. When another brick gets closer or farther away, it reacts by changing lights or making sounds. When placed on or next to a SMART Tag, it instantly assumes whatever role the tag assigns it—a police car, a duck, a helicopter, and so on.
SMART minifigures, on the other hand, react differently to their environment with different sounds, emotions and behaviors. That reaction is played through a speaker inside a nearby SMART brick; the minifigures themselves do not make a sound, but instead cause the brick to do so on their behalf.
LEGO SMART Play is expected to be officially launched on March 1st. Pre-orders for the LEGO Star Wars SMART Play all-in-one set begin Jan. 9.