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LEGO Unveils Smart Brick Platform At CES 2026
The toy giant is embedding sensors and wireless tech directly into a classic 2×4 brick, starting with app-free Star Wars sets launching in March.
LEGO is pushing deeper into connected play, revealing a sensor-packed “Smart Brick” at CES 2026 that bakes intelligence into a standard 2×4 form factor.
The new brick anchors SMART Play, a platform from LEGO that lets physical builds respond to movement, orientation and context without phones, apps or internet access. The system combines the Smart Brick with Smart Tags and Smart Minifigures, all designed to recognize one another and exchange data locally.
Inside the brick is a custom 4.1mm ASIC chip running what LEGO calls its Play Engine. The hardware stack includes an accelerometer, LED array, speaker and copper coils that detect motion, direction and the proximity of other Smart Bricks. Audio is generated dynamically during play, rather than triggered from fixed sound clips.
Smart Tags — thin 2×2 tiles with embedded digital IDs — and Smart Minifigures provide context. They tell the brick what role it is meant to play inside a build, whether that’s a vehicle, character or structure. “The role of the Smart Tag is to tell the Smart Brick how it should play back with you,” LEGO said.
To tie the system together, LEGO has built a local wireless layer called BrickNet, based on Bluetooth and a proprietary positioning method it calls Neighbor Position Measurement. The goal is for Smart components to communicate directly, with no external controller and no setup. LEGO is positioning the experience as closer to traditional play than to app-driven toys.
Power comes from long-life internal batteries designed to survive years of inactivity. Charging is wireless, with shared pads capable of topping up multiple bricks at once.
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The company is launching SMART Play through its largest licensed franchise, Star Wars. Three initial sets skew smaller and younger than LEGO’s recent adult-focused releases. Pricing runs from $70 for a 473-piece Darth Vader TIE Fighter to $160 for a 962-piece Throne Room Duel & A-wing set.
Pre-orders open January 9, with shelves set for March 1. The debut at CES 2026 lands as toy makers experiment with embedding intelligence directly into physical products — while LEGO makes a clear bet that play should stay off-screen.
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At I/O 2026, Sundar Pichai Concedes AI Must Deliver Real Value
Gemini 3.5, a personal agent called Spark, agentic shopping, and Android XR eyewear are all aimed at making AI feel useful, not just impressive.
Google’s annual I/O developer conference (I/O 2026) has recently become a status update on the same question: can the company turn its AI spending into products people use every day? This year, chief executive Sundar Pichai described Google as being in a phase of hyper progress, while conceding this is the part of the cycle where people want to see real value in the products they use on a day-to-day basis.
The strategy on display was to push agents — AI systems that act on a user’s behalf — into nearly every Google product at once. Search now has an “intelligent search box” that returns generated explainer videos alongside links. Gmail, Docs, YouTube and Maps are gaining their own agent layers, including a Docs Live feature that turns spoken instructions into drafted text with citations.
Two new models, Gemini 3.5 and a cheaper Gemini 3.5 Flash, arrived the same day. Google says 900 million people now use Gemini, and that more than 50 billion images have been generated with it. The pricing tier names are likely to confuse buyers: a new AI Ultra plan launches at $100 a month, while the older Gemini AI Ultra drops from $250 to $200.
The flashier announcements were Gemini Omni, a video generator pitched as a more realistic answer to OpenAI’s discontinued Sora 2, and Gemini Spark, a personal agent that handles recurring tasks across a user’s Google account. A new universal shopping cart lets agents complete purchases across multiple retailers from inside Google itself, placing the company between the merchant and the buyer, and also owning the checkout.
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Google also confirmed its Android XR eyewear, built with Samsung and frames from Warby Parker and Gentle Monster. Audio-only glasses ship this autumn; a display-equipped version, which would superimpose live translations into the wearer’s field of view, is still in development. Both sets translate, however only the display version shows you the result.
What Pichai did not resolve is the bargain underneath all this. An agent is only useful to the degree it knows your calendar, your inbox, your shopping history and your physical surroundings. Google has now confirmed that, in time, the same context may carry advertising.
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