Back in the old days, Lego bricks were just fun bits of plastic you'd imagine were doing things as you built them into spaceships and creatures. Now, those little creations might start doing things with you. Lego's new smart bricks, which the company announced at CES 2026 in Las Vegas, are the latest iteration of something I've seen in the works from Lego over the past decade.
They're coming sooner than you might think: Star Wars Lego sets with smart bricks arrive on March 1. And yes, that means TIE Fighters and smart Star Wars minifigures that will interact, making sounds and activating lights.
Lego has had complex robotics kits before in several iterations -- I remember when Lego had color-aware sensors in bricks and accelerometers. And I played with the Super Mario Lego sets that had little figures that could bop on other bricks and play games. These new smart bricks look like a fusion of some of those ideas, but they're also a more advanced way of having bricks recognize and activate inside big builds. Read on to learn about the smart brick sets Lego is showing off at CES 2026.
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Sensor-studded bricks know where they are
The new Smart Bricks, parts of what Lego calls a Smart Play system, are regular 2x4-stud size, but have their own application-specific integrated circuit, or ASIC, chips inside. There's an array of sensors: an accelerometer measures tilt and movement. There are speakers and synthesizers onboard to generate sounds on the fly, and ambient LED lights. They communicate with each other over Bluetooth. And there are magnetic coils that sense proximity to other special Lego Smart Tag tiles and Smart Minifigures, which have their own embedded tags that the bricks can sense nearby.
The bricks could be used in multiple Lego sets, and can recognize multiple Smart Tags and Smart Minifigures at once. Each one can send code to the brick to generate different lights and sounds.
What does this all look like when you're playing? Well, I haven't demoed it yet, but I will soon. I'll update this story when I do. But I've seen Lego's executives showing off how it works at CES on stage during a keynote presentation, and it works entirely by proximity. Placed on different color bricks, it could recognize those colors. Or multiple bricks can connect and mirror each other. The bricks can recognize distance in 3D space, even at a distance. To activate them, it looks like you give the bricks a little shake before playing.
What's wild to me is that Lego is promising a distributed network across as many bricks and tags as you'd like to connect with, or games you could invent where the vehicles know their distance from each other. Or, who knows?
Star Wars sets will interact with all the smart tags, minifigures and bricks. Lego
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