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Probably my favorite thing about the Lego Smart Play system unveiled this week at CES is that it was designed for kids, first and foremost. In the past 10 years or so, Lego has increasingly courted an older audience with more expensive and elaborate sets. But when it was time to bring more advanced technology to Lego, the idea right from the beginning was more social and interactive play.
If you haven't heard about Smart Play yet, its a way for Lego to make its sets more interactive. A Smart Brick filled with sensors makes it so sets can respond to each other, know when they're moving, play sounds and know when the corresponding Smart Minifigures are near them. Tiny Smart Tags, meanwhile, help the Smart Brick know the context of how it's being used — whether it's in a helicopter, car or duck for example.
Tom Donaldson, senior VP and Head of Creative Play Lab at the LEGO Group, told Engadget that the company worked on Smart Play for about eight years before introducing it this week, and that social play was the starting point. "We started really looking at consumer needs, and this idea that kids really like social play," said Donaldson "Kids really like the sort of things that change when they come back to them, and the kids really like agency. They want to be able to change things."
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Amazon is giving managers a badge-swipe dashboard that tracks how long corporate staff stay in the office, tightening enforcement of its five-day mandate.
The post Amazon Introduces Dashboard to Track Employee Attendance, Productivity appeared first on eWEEK.
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Grok has switched off its image creation and editing functions for most users following an international outcry over the tool's misuse to generate sexually explicit and violent imagery. The AI tool was developed by Elon Musk's xAI and integrated into the social media platform X. The decision comes amid mounting political and regulatory pressure, particularly […]
The post Grok Restricts Image Generation After Backlash Over Explicit AI Imagery appeared first on eWEEK.
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 Lumus got a major boost in brand recognition when one of its waveguides was selected for use in the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses. But that already feels like old tech now because at CES 2026, the company brought some of its latest components to the show and based on what I saw, they seem poised to seriously elevate the optical quality of the next wave of high-end smartglasses.
When the Meta Ray-Ban Displays glasses came out, they wowed users as they were (and still are) one of a handful of smartglassess to feature a full-color in-lens display with at least a 20-degree field of view. But going by the specs on Lumus' newest waveguides, we're set for a major upgrade in terms of future capabilities.
If you look closely, you can see where light from the waveguide propagates into the one of the smartglasses' lenses.Sam Rutherford for EngadgetThe first model I tried featured Lumus' optimized Z-30 waveguides, which not only offer a much wider 30-degree FOV, they are also 30 percent lighter and 40 percent thinner than previous generations. On top of that, Lumus says they are also more power efficient with the waveguides capable of hitting more than 8,000 nits per watt. This is a big deal because smartglasses are currently quite limited by the size of batteries they can use, especially if you want to make them
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CNET's on-the-ground reporters got a first look at the most innovative home tech products unveiled at CES 2026.
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 At CES 2026, Google announced some new Gemini features that it's bringing to Google TVs. Google TV is built into some TV sets and set-top boxes, and while it may not be immediately relevant to many Apple users, it does give us a look at what AI can do on a TV set.
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