is a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.
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CES 2026 live: all the news, announcements, and innovations from the show floor and beyond
We just gave the Lego Smart Brick our Best In Show award at CES 2026, and I wanted to stop by The Lego Group’s suite to get a last glimpse before I left Las Vegas.
To my surprise, the company showed off one more feature I didn’t see during my first demo, perhaps the most impressive one should these bricks make their way to adult builders: precise distance measurement.
Lego Group design manager Maarten Simons whipped out a “Lego ruler” made of standard Lego bricks divided into segments that were each 10 Lego studs, or roughly 8cm (3.15 inches) long. He attached a Smart Brick to one end of the ruler, and dragged a second Smart Brick along its length. The Smart Bricks changed color every time another 10 ten studs was passed, exactly at the dividing lines of each segment.
Simons then moved the Smart Bricks away from the ruler and performed the same trick. Using just a pair of Smart Bricks, he was able to measure the distance between two points in 2D and 3D space. Simons says the bricks can accurately track each other’s position at distances of up to roughly 4 to 5 meters (12–16 feet) away.
Then, Simons rotated a brick in midair, and we watched it light up as soon as it was precisely facing the other brick.
From previous briefings, I already knew the bricks could tell their own orientation and if they were relatively closer or further from each other. But it’s clearly more powerful than that, with more potential than the first three Lego Star Wars sets will offer on launch day (assuming these precision features work in the real world with all its forms of wireless interference).
The Lego Star Wars sets very intentionally let kids blast each other’s ships without them truly facing each other, because the company’s research shows kids prefer that. But it clearly doesn’t have to be that way. Low-hanging fruit: future Lego creations could have a precise blasting game.
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