Lego unveils tech-filled Smart Bricks

Lego has unveiled Good Bricks – tech-filled variations of its small constructing blocks – which it says will convey 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 Good Play system introduces new digital parts to the traditional 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 almost 50 years.

However Josh Golin, government director of youngsters’s wellbeing group Fairplay, believes Good 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 youngsters’s imaginations,” he advised the BBC.

“However with the discharge of Good Bricks, Lego is taking play out of the palms of youngsters and placing it into the tiny sensors of those so-called ‘sensible’ units.”

Andrew Manches, professor of youngsters and expertise on the College of Edinburgh, agreed the great thing about Lego lay in “the liberty to create, re-create, and adapt easy blocks into infinite 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 best way kids work together with its Good Play merchandise.

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

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

Lego says its Good 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 Good Minifigures and Good Tags tiles – two extra merchandise making up Lego’s Good Play System.

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

As an illustration, 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 contented birthday tune.

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

Tom Donaldson, head of Lego’s Inventive Play Lab, stated the tech meant to answer kids’s actions and complement the best way they naturally play.

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

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

Prof Manches advised the BBC decreased value and measurement of parts has “enabled extra toymakers to combine digital expertise seamlessly into a spread of toys”.

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

“The hot button is 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 similar to Nintendo and Fortnite-maker Epic Video games it has additionally seemed to attraction to followers of trending video games or new launches – releasing a Tremendous Mario Minifigure in 2020 with a tiny show display screen.

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