Lego Smart Play hands-on: Using technology to get kids to play together

Lego’s new Smart Play system, announced at CES earlier this week, is an embrace of digital technology the likes of which we haven’t seen from the company before. And while the demonstration it gave on Monday was a good start towards showing just what Lego’s Smart Brick is capable of, there’s no substitute for seeing it in person. Fortunately, an extended demo answered a lot of my questions on how the system will work once kids and adults get their hands on the first round of sets with Smart Play.

As I detailed yesterday, the Smart Play system contains three elements. The Smart Brick is packed with technology like proximity sensors, an accelerometer, color sensors and a speaker, all powered by a tiny chip. It’s ...