I’m deep inside Lego’s headquarters in Billund, Denmark, in a private office that’s part of the company’s Creative Play Lab. The secretive division of 237 staff based here and in London, Boston, and Singapore is dedicated to thinking up what comes next for the world’s largest toy brand.
In front of me, on a plain white table, is a batch of prototypes of Lego’s new Smart Brick, the final version of which is a small, sensor-laden 2-by-4 black brick with a big brain. No outsider has seen these prototypes, all of which represent stages of a journey Lego has been charting over the past eight years.
Lego hopes this innovation, which lands in stores March 1, will safeguard the future of its plastic empire. The diminutive proportions of the finished Smart Brick belie the fact that the thing is exceedingly clever. Inside is a tiny custom chip running bespoke software that can communicate with onboard sensors to monitor and react to motion, orientation, and magnetic fields.
It’s also likely no exaggeration that the Smart Brick could represent the most radical product Lego has produced since Jens Nygaard Knudsen, the company’s former longtime chief designer, created the minifigure nearly 50 years ago.
The Smart Brick is the brainchild of Tom Donaldson, senior vice president and head of Lego Group’s Creative Play Lab. The CPL, along with a team from the outside firm Cambridge Consultants, has spent years making iterative improvements, missteps, blunders, and breakthroughs on the project.
However, the prototypes on the table in front of me—circuit boards, glued bricks, exposed wires, and decapitated minifigures—are a far cry from the finished article. What the world will see instead when the new Smart Play System launches is a tranche of Star Wars sets that spring to life with light and sound. Darth Vader’s TIE fighter will make screaming engine sounds that change pitch as you bank and climb. A Throne Room Duel set offers up motion-activated thrumming lightsaber sounds, as well as a more than passable rendition of “The Imperial March.”
Lego has, of course, also got a new “smart” Millenium Falcon that, among other surprises (some features are hidden and must be discovered during play), uses the brick’s accelerometer to let you manually throttle up the ship’s hyperdrive. Luke’s X-34 Landspeeder emits a suitably sci-fi high-pitched whine but can also tell if you’ve crashed or are trying to refuel, and will adjust the sonic output accordingly.
Donaldson first came up with the idea for this revolutionary Smart Brick years ago, during the 2017 Christmas holidays, doing something remarkably mundane to a house—a real house, not a plastic one.
“I was working on a wall that had some damp, and I was pulling all the plaster off with a chisel drill,” he says. “And, you know, it was one of those times when, if you get really bored, you get creative moments.” Donaldson was thinking about how to make Lego play sets interactive when he had a series of “key insights.” He realized that, first of all, instead of one big bit of technology, they needed lots of small pieces of technology.
“Kids don’t play with one big thing,” Donaldson says. “It becomes boring, because kids play with lots of stuff. So we needed something that kids could have lots of.” The second insight was that it had to be a system: that the Smart Brick was the same no matter what Lego set you got.
Adding technology to something like a Lego set also presents technical hurdles. “We needed to think about wireless charging, because if you put batteries in those things, it’s a nightmare for parents. And it’s obvious that pairing is a problem, because kids aren’t going to sit there and pair three different things.”
Donaldson got to work on the project immediately, though he admits solving these technical issues took years longer than he was initially expecting.
Lego has taken a few cracks at interactive toys in the past. Lego Dimensions in 2015 was a gaming console crossover. In 2019, Lego Hidden Side relied on augmented reality, where hidden digital worlds and additional play challenges could be unlocked with a mobile app. In 2020, the Bluetooth-enabled Lego Super Mario appeared, the result of discussions with Nintendo that began back in 2015. Then, of course, there’s Mindstorms, Lego’s brick-based programmable robots, first introduced in 1998 but discontinued at the end of 2022.
None of these efforts have come close to conquering Lego’s System in Play, the basis for the interlocking bricks that was invented by Godtfred Kirk Christiansen in 1955 and that we all know today. Since then the Danish company, still owned by the Christiansen family, has solidified its position as the world’s largest toy brand by revenue, surpassing rivals Mattel and Hasbro. In 2024, Lego hit revenues of $11.8 billion, more than the GDP of Monaco for the same year, while at the same time clocking in double-digit consumer sales growth.
William Thorogood, the head of design and new business at Lego Group, has theories about the company’s previous swings at interactivity. “They didn’t have the longevity, because they were stand-alone,” he says. “They were within this walled garden. But [for Lego] every brick can be combined with every other one. That’s the whole point. As soon as you put a guardrail around it, it limits imagination.”
This is what makes the Smart Brick different for Lego. It’s not a stand-alone system. It’s specifically meant to integrate into the world of the OG bricks. And no screens are allowed.
Crammed into the eight-stud brick are an LED array, accelerometer, light sensors, sound sensor, a miniature speaker, a battery with wireless charging, an analog synthesizer, and a hair-thin copper coil assembly—all controlled by a 4.1-millimeter custom mixed-signal ASIC chip running bespoke software that takes its instructions from Lego’s accompanying NFC-enabled smart tiles and smart minifigs.
Since the mission was to have many Smart Bricks communicate with each other during play, Lego had to build a proprietary “Brick-to-Brick position system” using the copper coils to sense distance, direction, and orientation between multiple brain bricks. And because the Smart Play System needs to work without screens, this network had to be a completely self-organizing system requiring no setup, no app, no central hub, no external controllers. If the network fell over, it would have to be able to reset itself and keep working all on its own. A Bluetooth-based “BrickNet” protocol had to be developed to share data between the Smart Bricks.
In all, the Smart Brick boasts more than 20 patented world-firsts. No wonder, then, Lego needed some help. The company brought in Cambridge Consultants, a product development team within the French tech firm Capgemini, to collaborate. That team’s technical director, Andrew Knights, led the collaboration with Donaldson and his Creative Play Lab cohorts.
“Tom came with this vision that he wanted to do something with technology that amplifies kids’ play” says Knights. “But the real driver was it’s got to be a Lego product. It’s got to look and feel like Lego. It’s got to be true to the system.”
Every two weeks, the teams would put the prototypes in front of kids and watch them play. They soon recognized a “sweet spot.”
“If you catch the moment where the kid is doing something which they are in control of, you can inject some stimulus at that point and make them really engaged,” Knights says. “Get them to imagine more by catching what they’re doing, understanding it, then amplifying it.”
That sounds simple—but Knights and his team realized they needed to understand the fundamental context of play far better than Lego had ever previously.
“We needed lots of sensors to build up a true understanding of what kids were doing. What is the model they’ve built? What is it they would expect to happen? And when should it happen?” says Knights. “That then became a big question of what technology could do that, and how the heck are we going to get it into what we’ve got on the table here.”
Knights picks up what looks like a fat Lego crocodile with wires held down by Blu Tack. It’s the very first prototype made right at the start of the Smart Brick saga. “It’s a dev board. There’s nothing custom here, but it’s capacitive touch. The idea was you could grab this and the head would spin,” says Knights, adding that this was an experiment in physical interaction. He proudly says he made it in about three hours, after which it immediately went on a plane to Lego HQ.
The fat crocodile must have made an impression, as Lego and Cambridge Consultants continued down this path for another year and a half. The next significant leap came in the form of two giant gray bricks made from 3D-printed cases filled with tech anyone can buy online. One, labeled “LB” for light brick, has a light sensor at the end. The other is called “SB” for sound brick.
“Even with them being this chunky and this crude, we had a hackathon,” says Knights. “We got loads of people together and said make something fun with those bricks. And you could instantly start to build fun, making fire engines, putting fires out in houses—all sorts of things, just using basic functions.”
The kids’ tests were showing the same things too. Knights knew they were onto something.
However, massive 10-by-4 bricks simply wouldn’t do. The mission then became one of miniaturization, and to help with this another hackathon was convened, one that resulted in Knights and his team having to build 40 prototypes by hand. “I didn’t sleep for two nights,” he tells me.
Knights says that at some point during the first Covid lockdown, they settled on a key directive: Lego needs to turn exploration into a product, some evolution of System In Play that will last decades.
Crucially, it also needed to fit in with how Lego makes Lego. The toy company does not make Harry Potter minifigs from scratch; it makes vast numbers of blank torsos, only some of which are eventually printed as Harry Potters. This is called a “late dedication point” in the manufacturing process. The Smart Brick had to fit into this same process, and so to keep that operating model the brain brick had to be generic, able to be pumped out on a production line.
This is where the Smart Tags come in. “It’s the tags that allow you to have that late choice of saying, ‘Right, this run is Star Wars—let’s make Star Wars tags,’” says Knights. Think of the generic brain brick like a games console and the tags like game cartridges. “So we went down the RFID tag root, NFC—and that seemed to really work,” he says. This was also the point where the team started to put NFC tags in minifigs, so a person snapping on different minifigures can change how the play flows, works, and responds.
Knights says the tags effectively work like contactless credit cards. “That’s what they are. They’ve just been shrunk down, and they don’t contain a lot of memory,” he says. “They’re designed to hold your card number, name, and your sort code—but we have come up with a way to encode the games in that much memory. We went back to the thoughts of the 1980s where you would encode games in tiny, tiny memory footprints, and used the same principles here.”
I ask Knights if writing unique programs encoding instructions that are action and context specific that fit on the miniscule memory of the tags was difficult. He nearly falls off his seat. “Yes,” he says, “it’s difficult. But this project was all about solving problems. So writing games in next to no memory? We’ll take on that challenge.”
The puzzle of wireless charging led to another innovation. With phones you have one wireless charger for one phone. But Lego wanted kids to play with multiple Smart Bricks running multiple sets. “So we solved the problem that many people have failed at: one-to-many wireless charging. Multiple bricks on the same charger. That’s not normal,” says Knights.
Wait a minute. Isn’t that the problem Apple famously couldn’t solve? “Yes.” Have you told Apple? “Not directly, no. We’ve had prototype chargers charging 10 bricks at a time. And we’ve designed it to charge at height as well, so you could put the whole model on the charging pad. The whole system is designed for future compatibility,” Knights says.
The wireless charging system was built on top of the tag-reading system, so the same coils do both things: charge the battery and read the code stored on the NFC tag. This in turn enables a completely new technology the team invented called NFC positioning, which can tell which face of the brick the tag is on.
Put the Smart Brick in the middle of your Lego creation, plop the whole thing onto the charging pad, turn it this way and that. All the while, the coils can see where the bricks are spatially and rotationally in relation to each other. This 3D-positioning system is accurate down to the millimeter. It’s the feature the team is most proud of.
“The nearest thing we saw close to this was in the F-16 fighter jet, which in the helmet has something inside to know where you’re looking relative to the seat,” says Knights.
To achieve all this is hard enough when you have plenty of space. To get all this into a single brick required a custom chip.
Years in development, Lego’s tiny custom chip handles the battery charging, wireless charging, positioning, NFC, reading, audio amplifiers, lights—everything that the brick does, other than the processing and Bluetooth. It was the only way of crushing all the tech down without compromising on performance or size.
“Every bit of technology was pushed to the physics limit,” says Knights.
Lego’s manufacturing has been pushed to the limit, as well. The new assembly line has to cope with making Smart Bricks and their chargers at volume. Just the coils, for example, consist of wires that are 100 microns, with 10 turns on each side on six tiers, then these are bonded onto the circuit board.
“The charging goes up to tens of volts, and the position sensing goes down to single digit microvolts,” says Knights. “So we’ve got seven orders of magnitude difference in signal size that we’re dealing with on the same [circuit] on the same coils. So these kinds of challenges really, really pushed us.”
The project needed more than mere technical insight. It needed a president of play. A fun foreman.
Lego Group design director Michael Fuller has been at the company for 18 years. “The Lego Batman Movie, that was five, six years of my life,” Fuller says. After wrapping the 2017 film, Fuller was trying to work out what he was going to do next when Donaldson approached him.
“I actually tried to convince him I wasn’t right for it. I’m not techie at all. I’m old-school. But Tom said, ‘No, that’s what we need. I’ve got lots of smart engineers and techie people. I need a toy guy.’”
And so Fuller was drafted in. “In the early days, I was just drawing concepts. I had a wall at Cambridge Consultants with hand-drawn concepts of ‘What if? What if? What if?’”
From there, they moved on to handmade prototypes, a phase Fuller estimates encompassed half of the total development time. “It was quite a small team of people, and you had to be resilient,” he says. This resilience was put to the test when early prerelease Smart Brick Jungle Explorers play sets were scrapped in favor of the eventual Star Wars models.
“These were actually out in the world,” Fuller says, holding up one of the boxes marked with TEST written in large red letters. “Kids did play with them. We got feedback. I went through evenings of telemetry, trying to work out which bits kids were really enjoying and which bits they weren’t so interested in.”
In all my years of reporting on gear I’ve seen very few products survive the development process with no compromises. Something is nearly always sacrificed along the way for ease, or money, or both. Not so, it seems, with the Smart Brick.
“We said, ‘Let’s do everything. Let’s put it all in,’” Knights says. He lists all of the wish-list features that were eventually delivered. There’s a synthesizer in the system; the sounds you hear are generated, not prerecorded. There are sensors that can detect light and dark and color. There are lights on the brick that can not only change color but also communicate to other bricks like a TV remote. Some of this didn’t even exist at the start of the project.
Toward the end of my Smart Brick tour, it strikes me that there is clearly tech developed here that could have applications beyond Lego. Possibly even military uses, not that the company would ever blunder into such a sector. Still, there is the chance to make much more money than through just selling building block sets.
Donaldson is uninterested. He claims profit was never the driving factor. “I didn’t say, ‘Here’s a business case with the exact revenue.’ We just said, ‘If we can do this, we all know there would be something big.’”
The post An Inside Look at Lego’s New Tech-Packed Smart Brick appeared first on Wired.
