Robotic Legos Come from the Minds at MIT

Perhaps emboldened by its recent foray into the computer-gaming arena (with Mindscape's Lego Island release), Denmark's plastic interlocking brick maker Lego today unveiled a pair of computer-related products.

Lego is billing its Mindstorm Robotics Invention System and Technic Cybermaster collectively as "a new generation of intelligent construction toys and learning tools for children." Children can build and program robotic inventions that move and, Lego says, "act and think on their own" using the Mindstorm system. The Technic Cybermaster is a playset for older children that "combines the virtual fun of onscreen adventure with physical models that (children) can build and bring to life with a home computer," again according to Lego.

Lego announced a four percent increase in consumer sales for 1997, the 23rd year of consumer sales growth in the company's 24-year history. Lego said that its Lego Island CD-ROM game sold 750,000 units worldwide in 1997.

The underlying technology was codeveloped with the wunderkind of MIT's Media Lab in Cambridge, MA.

For a few years, the Epistemology and Learning Group has been focused on developing new ways of learning. One of the group's major focuses has been on children, since their capacity for learning unusual new information is much higher then adults. Last year, GameSpot News got to take a look at some of the early prototypes in the invitation-only halls of one of the most wired places in the world, MIT's shrine to technology - the Media Lab.

What we saw was a series of different robotic-like creatures that looked like insects. The ones that were shown in an example of the technology were called Crickets. The Crickets were programmed through a small Macintosh with a simple push-button interface. What the group accomplished was simple, but it showed what computing may be doing for the future of artificial intelligence. Crickets could "talk to one another" via infrared beams, and you could see a series of small LEDs blink as they babbled. Then they danced back and forth in unison. Much of this was not even programmed, they just did it.

Lego's first implementation of the new Legos will let kids build mini creatures that can see and feel their environment. The new Legos are expected to hit shelves late this fall.