Lego has officially announced a new 2x4 "smart brick" at CES 2026 this week. It's apparently the "most significant evolution" in the Lego system since the release of the Minifigure in 1978 and is part of the company's "smart play" initiatives.

The Lego Group has unveiled its Smart Play system, which uses “Smart Bricks” and “Smart Tags” to bring Lego sets to life. The Smart Bricks are powered by a custom ASIC chip that is smaller than one standard Lego stud and is highly specialised for the features of the Lego Smart Play system.

LEGO has revealed a new interactive system called LEGO SMART Play, which adds built-in electronics to physical LEGO sets to make them react with sounds, lights, and movement. The system was shown this week at CES 2026 and represents one of LEGO’s biggest changes to traditional play in decades.

In the Star Wars sets launching with Smart Play in March, the Emperor minifig will play the Imperial March when you sit him on this throne. Ships can blast at each other with laser noises, and lightsabers will hum and whirl when figures holding them are moved.

Students, hobbyists and tech-savvy parents who use–or plan to use–the LEGO Mindstorms kits with the NXT computer module usually program the device through a graphical language such as a subset of LabVIEW from National Instruments. But ambitious ...