Lego’s new Smart Play technology involved IT pros in its development

Lego, whose blocks have fueled kids’ construction dreams for almost eight decades, took a new, tech-infused step at this year’s CES.

At the center of that change is Smart Play, which took eight years from concept to execution, project leader Tom Donaldson told IT Brew. Donaldson, a Lego SVP based in the UK, said the Creative Play Lab that developed Smart Play plays a strong IT role within the company.

“It’s our R&D unit, it’s our disruptive innovation unit, and it’s the unit that develops and maintains all of the technology in our physical products,” Donaldson said. “Electronics, hardware, mechatronics, all of those types of things.”

Talk to me. Smart Play uses a specialized brick to communicate with Smart Tags—flat two-by-two pieces that generate different responses—and Smart Minifigures. Each Smart Brick contains sensors to tell which direction it’s facing and even what color brick it’s touching.

While the bricks don’t use words, they make unique noises depending on the interplay between tags; this is to facilitate open play, Lego Design Manager María Salgado told reporters during a demo at CES.

“The way that they react is abstract, and that helps the kids to also come up with their own stories,” Salgado, who was part of the team that put the project together, said.

For Smart Play, Lego had to find a way to integrate a series of technological needs into a finite space. The development team was tasked with prototype testing and simulations, from robot-assisted manipulation to human play. Researchers also turned to software solutions, using virtual environments to simulate the bricks’ capabilities and errors at a high level with PC-runnable language.

“We can test a lot of the logic to make sure that it doesn’t have errors,” Donaldson said. “Whether or not it’s ‘good’ is different than whether or not it’s error-free—and we can test a lot of that in a software environment.”

Keep it secure. Smart Bricks communicate via “Brick Net,” Lego’s Bluetooth solution. IT Brew asked Donaldson about the potential for hacking—the possibility that attackers could use smart devices as a springboard to access internal systems is one we heard a lot about at CES this year.

Donaldson told IT Brew that communication between the bricks is encrypted as part of a suite of security protections. The bricks don’t show up as connected devices unless they’re on the charger, when parents can access them through a parental app.

“We take that very seriously: We think about the security of the code, we think about the security of the communication, we think about the physical security,” Donaldson said. “We’ve looked at all of those and try to do our best to ensure that we’re providing something that’s pretty robust for the kids.”