Every year, CES delivers a wave of gadgets that trigger two typical reactions.
Excitement about what might be possible, and skepticism about whether any of this will ever matter in practice.

For me, gadgets are not about hype. They are about early discovery. They are hands on probes into where technology is quietly heading, long before it becomes mainstream. The recent launch of the LEGO Smart Brick at CES is a perfect example.

Gadgets are not about hype. They are hands on probes into where technology is quietly heading.

At first glance, it looks playful. LEGO bricks with embedded sensing and spatial awareness. But when you look closer, something more fundamental is happening. Spatial computing is moving out of labs and demos and into everyday, tangible objects.

And that is where curiosity becomes a serious innovation skill.

Sometimes the most important innovations are the ones that quietly change how we think, long before they change what we buy.

From MIT Research to the Living Room

This is not the first time I have seen this pattern.

Years ago, while working as CTO at Televic, I actively explored emerging interaction technologies. One of the most fascinating ones at the time was Siftables, a product originating from MIT Media Lab research.

Siftables were the first time spatial awareness was demonstrated in an actual product, not just a lab prototype. These small interactive blocks could detect how they were positioned relative to each other. When their spatial configuration changed, their behavior changed as well.

This enabled entirely new interaction concepts. Each block had its own screen, yet the screens could cooperate. You could build a virtual road across multiple blocks and have a small car drive along it. When the car reached the edge of a block, it would seamlessly continue onto the next one. Move a block, extend the road, and the virtual world adapted instantly.

Physical movement directly shaping digital behavior was the real breakthrough.

If you have never seen Siftables in action, the original MIT demonstration video from 2009 already shows how these blocks cooperated across screens and reacted directly to physical movement. David Merrill later explained the underlying thinking and design principles in a TEDx talk on tangible interaction and Siftables.

The core ideas behind Siftables later found their way into consumer products such as Boggle Flash by Hasbro, where spatial awareness and adjacency rules enabled playful, screen based interaction without traditional interfaces.

I bought Sifteo Cubes at Televic purely to experiment. There was never an intention to turn them into a product. The goal was to get a hands on feel for multi screen collaboration, spatial awareness, and what it meant when digital interfaces escaped the confines of a single display.

To deepen that exploration, we also arranged student projects around these experiments. Students brought fresh perspectives, curiosity, and the freedom to explore without preconceived constraints. For Televic, this was a low threshold way to explore emerging concepts while creating a meaningful learning environment for young engineers.

This was not accidental. In my layered collaboration model, students form a distinct and very valuable collaboration layer. I explain this approach in more detail in the strategic collaboration layered innovation model.

Engaging with students in this way is an extremely interesting approach for innovative companies. It allows experimentation, idea generation, and early validation while building future talent relationships. I will come back to this approach and its many benefits in a future blog.

That experimentation was valuable precisely because it was low risk and curiosity driven.

What Happened to Siftables

Despite the technological elegance and strong early interest, Sifteo as a company did not survive.

In 2014, Sifteo quietly shut down its consumer operations. The product never reached mass adoption, and the company struggled to scale beyond a niche audience. What remained, however, was not failure in the innovation sense. The technology and ideas did not disappear. They influenced how people thought about tangible interaction, spatial computing, and distributed interfaces.

Too early to succeed commercially does not mean too early to matter.

Siftables became one of those early signals that arrive before the market is ready. Too early to succeed commercially, but far too important to ignore.

From Experimental Blocks to Everyday Ecosystems

While Siftables never became a mass market success, the underlying concept did find its way into mainstream products, just in a different form.

Apple is a strong example of this evolution. Over the years, macOS, iPadOS, and iOS have quietly incorporated spatial and contextual awareness across devices.

You can copy content on one device and paste it on another. You can start writing an email on your iPhone and continue seamlessly on your Mac. An iPad can extend a Mac’s screen, becoming a spatially positioned second display.

What once required experimental blocks is now an invisible, everyday experience.

What Changed: From Adjacency to Triangulation

The real shift was not smarter bricks, but bricks that understand where they are.

Fast forward to today, and the LEGO Smart Brick shows how far we have come.

LEGO has published an official introduction to Smart Play and a short Instagram demo that make this shift tangible.

The LEGO Smart Brick sets are expected to become available for pre order soon. They are definitely on my list to buy, explore, and experiment with.

From Play to Progress

Play is often where serious innovation quietly begins.

Spatially aware computing is no longer a future promise. It is quietly becoming part of everyday products. LEGO bricks. Light bulbs. Games. Environments.

Where would your business benefit from spatially aware computing solutions? And where might it be time to start buying gadgets, exploring, and learning before others do?

If this reflection resonates and you want to explore how early signals like these could translate into concrete innovation paths for your organisation, you are welcome to get in touch via the contact page. I am happy to think along with you.