The LEGO Group is innovating its iconic play pattern with a new technology that promises to create a more immersive experience for young builders. 

Called SMART Play and unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas yesterday, this new system helps built sets come to life with bricks that trigger lights, sounds and games, offering a more immersive way for kids to interact with LEGO and its licensed brands.

The building blocks

At the heart of the new platform are three core components that work together to drive the play experience:

• First up is the patented LEGO SMART Brick, which is the same size as a standard LEGO brick but acts as the brain of the build, using built-in sensors, speakers and light-up technology to recognize when a child is playing with the set and to respond to their actions. 
• This amped-up brick interacts with a physical LEGO SMART Tag that (when in close proximity) tells it what object or creature to emulate. Some examples include a roaring dinosaur, a speedy starship or a bulked-up muscle car. 
• Meanwhile, SMART Minifigures bring personality to the experience by reacting to the build they’re part of with their own set of unique sounds, moods and reactions. So a pilot minifigure flying high in a spacecraft might prompt the SMART Brick to play a sound of excitement, for example, while a chef figure placed out of their comfort zone in the same cockpit might say they’re nervous for takeoff. (This creates an opportunity for kids to revisit their completed SMART sets and unlock more unique interactions or sounds as they expand their minifigure collections.) 

Brands at work 

LEGO will bring its new building system to market in March with the rollout of three LEGO Star Wars SMART Play SKUs in March: Luke’s Red Five X-Wing (US$89.99), Darth Vader’s TIE Fighter (US$69.99, pictured) and a 962-piece Throne Room Duel set (US$159.99). After the builds are complete with their SMART components in place, some interactive features kids can expect to experience include hearing the Imperial March theme when Emperor Palpatine is placed on his throne; X-Wings making wooshing noises as they are moved from room to room; and lightsabers crackling when Luke and Darth Vader minifigures collide. 

According to a release, LEGO chose Star Wars as the guinea pig brand for this SMART system because consumer familiarity with its worlds, characters and stories creates an exciting, recognizable starting point from which kids can experiment with the new features and tech. The company says kids inherently know how to use starships in battle, but the experience is now amplified when the sets make the sounds and effects they recognize from the films. 

While LEGO plans to continue expanding SMART Play with more updates and product launches this year, it’s keeping the names of the brands that will be featured next under wraps for now. But the company’s stacked licensing portfolio would provide some easy slam dunks—like a Hogwarts Castle coming to life as Harry explores its halls, a legion of Pokémon that can express their personalities from the anime series, or the full race car experience of making a pit stop to swap out an F1 car’s tires before zooming off into the final lap.