Skip to main content

Sifteo Cubes spell the next generation of puzzle gaming

Image used with permission by copyright holder

If you’re looking for the best new interactive toy that is 1) actually fun 2) good for multiplayers 3) extremely portable, Sifteo Cubes are a match made in heaven. They are literally technology-infused building blocks for kids. Sifteo Cubes contain the specs that rival most budget tablets and smartphones. Each cube contain sensors on all four sides that recognize when the cubes neighbor and touch each other to extend the screen. This means infinite screen real estate, as long as you’re willing to rearrange and pair cubes to one another.

The cubes also feature touchscreens so you can play various types of games on the device. For example, we got to demo an RPG emulator that asked players to connect the cube to create pathways for the main character to walk around and collect items. To move from one cube’s screen to the other, the user just has to tap the connected cube’s screen. In another multiplayer game, users see balls in four different colors and are required to tilt the cube so balls would fall on one side, and connect it with another cube that has balls of the same color to make them disappear. It’s basically Bejeweled 3.0, and has a very small learning curve before you’re battling with four other players to get the new high score. Graphics are also quite impressive, outfitting pixels that remind us of the good old Nintendo DS while maintaining full color vibrancy.

The cubes all communicate with the main dock via a proprietary chip that’s similar to Bluetooth, and each run on AAA batteries that last approximately six hours in continuous play. You can also purchase more cubes and connect up to 12 per session. At launch, Sifteo offers a handful number of games available for the device but there is also an Open Source community for programmers to create their own gaming or educational apps. It’s a neat way to improve logic skills without jumping on Dance Dance Revolution pads to exercise hand-eye coordination.

Sifteo Cubes are available now online and in Barnes & Noble stores at $130 for a starter kit containing a dock and three cubes. Additional Sifteo cubes run for $30 apiece.

Editors' Recommendations

Natt Garun
Former Digital Trends Contributor
An avid gadgets and Internet culture enthusiast, Natt Garun spends her days bringing you the funniest, coolest, and strangest…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more