Lego's smart new 2x4 Smart Brick packs a custom ASIC, speaker, and synthesiser created by 'an expert team from the worlds of video gaming, computing... and more'
Lego "assembled an expert team from the worlds of video gaming, electronic engineering, industrial design, user experience, architecture, computing, sound… and much more" to create a tiny brick with a speaker and custom ASIC smaller than a single Lego stud. The Danish toy giant calls the new Smart Brick its "biggest innovation since the first Lego minifigure in 1978… Lego bricks that play back."
At its heart we're talking about a standard 2 x 4 brick that features a ton of technology inside—from accelerometers, to light and sound sensors, to a mini speaker—that allows it to respond to other Lego pieces in real time and in space. There are already similar kinds of things built into toys that respond to cameras in your smart devices to 'enhance' play, but I love the fact Lego has deliberately eschewed that avenue because of the attention a screened device will inevitably pull away from the physical play.
As a human who lives full-time with two very small humans, I'm all too aware that when a screen pops out of your pocket—even if it's to interact with the physical world—that it will immediately become the object of attention to the exclusion of all else. It's very Lego to consciously skip that possibility entirely.
Combined with Smart Tags and Smart Minifigures, the Smart Brick will respond to actions "with appropriate sounds and behaviours" relating to those individual pieces. Build up a library of Smart Tags and corresponding minifigs and you can start to create a whole new world of Lego-based fun times. It's the tags and figs that tell the Smart Brick what sounds to play through its built-in speaker system, with the different tags allowing you to create different vehicles, space ships, effects, and animals.
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But the accelerometers in the Smart Bricks themselves also change the sounds it can make as you twist and turn them around. These aren't recorded sounds, either, because that speaker is driven by an onboard synthesiser. "So, we're talking about a potentially limitless number of sounds it can make," says Lego.
"Individual sounds usually require individual soundtracks. But we went in a different direction," reads the Lego post about how it made the Smart Play system. "By breaking down just a few sounds to their most basic principles, you can actually carefully adjust their frequencies and amplitude to create drastically different end results. So, you might hear our Smart Brick roaring like a jet plane or flushing like a toilet... but never realise they use the same core sounds."
The Smart Play system as a whole is going to make its debut in the Lego Star Wars theme, with—obviously—an X-Wing set and a TIE Figher set, as well as a Throne Room Duel set featuring Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader battling in front of a cackling Palpatine. Those twin lightsaber duel tags sure are going to be a whole lot of fun to play with.
Pre-orders go live on January 9, with the three sets launching in March. That's just in time for my birthday, just sayin'.