LEGO simply made its most formidable exhibiting ever at CES, the world’s largest shopper electronics commerce present—an uncommon venue for a toy large, and a telling one. At this 12 months’s CES in Las Vegas, LEGO unveiled a screen-less system referred to as the “SMART Brick,” a bid to carry a myriad of senses to its silent, extremely exact plastic bricks.
The SMART Brick is a typical two-by-four LEGO brick (1.6 cm by 3.2 cm) with a tiny, customized ASIC chip embedded inside. That chip permits the brick to acknowledge distance, shade and movement, and even to interpret the “personalities” of 1000’s of LEGO minifigures.
The brick sits on the middle of LEGO’s new “SMART Play” system, a platform designed to make bodily play extra interactive and enjoyable. It’s meant to be a system “the place expertise seamlessly brings LEGO units to life, responding to actions with acceptable sounds and behaviours, permitting for a very responsive play expertise,” in line with LEGO. The Danish firm is billing SMART Play as its most vital product innovation in 50 years, because the introduction of the minifigure within the late Seventies.
The SMART Brick, sufficiently small to be built-in in any LEGO mannequin, packs in way over its dimension suggests. It contains responsive lights, a color-recognition scanner to sense its environment, a sound synthesizer able to producing a variety of results, and a built-in accelerometer that tracks how the brick strikes by means of the air in real-time.
The SMART brick works along with SMART tags and SMART minifigures. A SMART Tag is a flat, 2×2 studless tile embedded with a novel digital ID that tells a close-by SMART Brick what function it ought to assume in a given context. SMART minifigures, with out a seen tag, additionally comprise their very own distinctive digital IDs that encode a personality’s “persona” and information how the SMART Brick ought to behave when that determine is close by.
Throughout a demo at CES, Tom Donaldson, senior vice chairman and head of Inventive Play Lab on the LEGO Group, positioned a SMART Brick on a panel divided into 4 colours: crimson, inexperienced, blue and yellow. Because the brick moved throughout the floor, it lit as much as match the colour beneath it.
“If you put that in a LEGO mannequin, the mannequin is aware of the world round it,” Donaldson stated. “It is aware of it’s in a water bayou; it is aware of it’s in a jungle bayou as a result of it’s inexperienced; possibly it is aware of it’s in a crimson hearth engine over a blue police automobile.”
In one other demonstration, Donaldson hooked up a SMART Brick to a LEGO yellow duck and moved it by means of completely different positions—splashing, sleeping, even flying to check whether or not the duck accredited. The brick responded with sounds that conveyed completely different feelings: contentment, loud night breathing, irritation and extra.
The SMART Brick can even sense proximity. When one other brick strikes nearer or farther away, it reacts by altering its lights or emitting sounds. When positioned on or close to a SMART Tag, it immediately assumes no matter function the tag assigns it—a police automobile, a duck, a helicopter and so forth.
SMART minifigures, in the meantime, react uniquely to their environments by means of distinct sounds, moods and behaviors. These reactions are performed by means of the speaker inside a close-by SMART Brick; the minifigures themselves don’t produce sound, however as a substitute set off the brick to take action on their behalf.
LEGO SMART Play is about to formally launch on March 1. Preorders for an all-in-one LEGO Star Wars SMART Play set start on Jan. 9.
