{"id":19835,"date":"2026-01-05T23:49:15","date_gmt":"2026-01-05T23:49:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2026\/01\/05\/lego-smart-brick-debuts-at-ces-bringing-senses-to-classic-bricks\/"},"modified":"2026-01-05T23:49:16","modified_gmt":"2026-01-05T23:49:16","slug":"lego-smart-brick-debuts-at-ces-bringing-senses-to-classic-bricks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2026\/01\/05\/lego-smart-brick-debuts-at-ces-bringing-senses-to-classic-bricks\/","title":{"rendered":"LEGO Smart Brick Debuts at CES, Bringing Senses to Classic Bricks"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A presentation during the LEGO SMART Play launch event at Mandalay Bay Convention Center on Jan. 05, 2026 in Las Vegas, Nevada. David Becker\/Getty Images for The LEGO Group<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

LEGO just made its most ambitious showing ever at CES, the world\u2019s largest consumer electronics trade show\u2014an unusual venue for a toy giant, and a telling one. At this year\u2019s CES in Las Vegas, LEGO unveiled a screen-less device called the \u201cSMART Brick,\u201d a bid to bring a myriad of senses to its silent, incredibly precise<\/a> plastic bricks.<\/p>\n

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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 \u201cpersonalities\u201d of thousands of LEGO minifigures.<\/p>\n

The brick sits at the center of LEGO\u2019s new \u201cSMART Play\u201d system, a platform designed to make physical play more interactive and fun. It\u2019s meant to be a system \u201cwhere technology seamlessly brings LEGO sets to life, responding to actions with appropriate sounds and behaviours, allowing for a truly responsive play experience,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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The SMART brick works in conjunction with SMART tags and SMART minifigures. A SMART Tag is a flat, 2\u00d72 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\u2019s \u201cpersonality\u201d and guide how the SMART Brick should behave when that figure is nearby.<\/p>\n

During a demo at CES, Tom Donaldson<\/a>, senior vice president and head of Creative Play Lab at the LEGO Group<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you put that in a LEGO model, the model knows the world around it,\u201d Donaldson said. \u201cIt knows it\u2019s in a water<\/keyword> bayou; it knows it\u2019s in a jungle bayou because it\u2019s green; maybe it knows it\u2019s in a red fire engine over a blue police car.\u201d<\/p>\n

In another demonstration, Donaldson attached a SMART Brick to a LEGO yellow duck and moved it through different positions\u2014splashing, sleeping, even flying to test whether the duck approved. The brick responded with sounds that conveyed different emotions: contentment, snoring, irritation and more.<\/p>\n

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\u2014a police car, a duck, a helicopter and so on.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t produce sound, but instead trigger the brick to do so on their behalf.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\"LEGO\u2019s<\/p><\/div>\n