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, mild and response to motion.

Nonetheless, the brand new product vary is inflicting unease amongst play consultants, who say it dangers undermining what makes Lego particular for kids 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 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, government director of kids’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 baby play with old-school Legos is aware of, kids’s Lego creations already do transfer and make noises by way of the facility of kids’s imaginations,” he advised the BBC.

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

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

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

“We do not have a look at the digital world as a risk,” 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 numerous methods throughout play.

Measuring 2×4, the brick itself accommodates 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 further 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.

For example, 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 supposed to answer kids’s actions and praise the way in which they naturally play.

He stated the Good Brick’s reactions to responses would “hopefully encourage and shock the consumer 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 elements has “enabled extra toymakers to combine digital know-how seamlessly into a spread of toys”.

However he added regardless of thrilling innovation, considerations stay in regards to the safety and privateness of latest and rising sensible toys for kids – 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 kids’s on a regular basis lives,” he stated.

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 means of collaborations with online game publishers resembling 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.

Lego chief government Niels B. Christiansen stated in its 2024 Annual Report it had accelerated spending on digital know-how as a “strategic space” for the corporate