Lego unveils tech-filled Smart Bricks

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

Nonetheless, the brand new product vary has obtained a combined response from play consultants, who say it dangers undermining what makes Lego distinct for youngsters in an more and more digital world.

Introduced on the Client Electronics Present (CES) 2026 in Las Vegas, the Danish toymaker’s Good Play system introduces new digital elements 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, govt director of youngsters’s wellbeing group Fairplay, believes Good Bricks may “undermine what was as soon as nice about Legos” – harnessing youngsters’s personal creativeness throughout play.

He mentioned the toy didn’t require further options to generate sounds or different results.

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

Andrew Manches, professor of youngsters and expertise on the College of Edinburgh, agreed the fantastic thing about Lego lay in “the liberty to create, re-create, and adapt easy blocks into limitless tales powered by youngsters’s creativeness”.

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

Julia Goldin, the corporate’s chief product and advertising and marketing officer, beforehand informed the BBC it seen digital expertise as a possibility to “broaden bodily play and bodily constructing”.

“We do not take a look at the digital world as a menace,” she mentioned – including its good 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 accelerometer 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 elements, these possess digital identifiers triggering completely different sounds or reactions once 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” have 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 Artistic Play Lab, mentioned the tech supposed to answer youngsters’s actions and complement the way in which they naturally play.

He mentioned 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 wish to final for a few years,” he mentioned.

Prof Manches informed the BBC lowered value and dimension of elements has “enabled extra toymakers to combine digital expertise seamlessly into a spread of toys”.

However he added regardless of thrilling innovation, issues stay in regards to the safety and privateness of recent and rising good toys for youngsters – significantly 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 youngsters’s on a regular basis lives,” he mentioned.

It isn’t the primary time Lego has dabbled in digital experimentation or sought to enchantment 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 akin to Nintendo and Fortnite-maker Epic Video games it has additionally appeared to enchantment to followers of trending video games or new launches – releasing a Tremendous Mario Minifigure in 2020 with a tiny show display screen.

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