Playware and Henrik Hautop Lund's modular robotic tiles for play

Playware is the use of technology to create the kind of leisure activity people normally call play. Henrik Hautop Lund, professor at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), defines it as intelligent hardware and software that aims at producing play and playful experiences, with computer games as one sub-genre. Wikipedia credits the term to Lund and Carsten Jessen and quotes the definition as "hardware and software that aims at producing play and playful experiences among its users."

Lund founded the Center for Playware to study how playful robotics can motivate ordinary people to interact with the robots of daily life. On May 28, 2010 he gave a talk on the subject at the MIT Media Lab complex, listed under the title Playware: Robots at Play. Lund is known internationally for bringing robotics into new uses, and the talk laid out the center's approach to play, rehabilitation and teaching with robots.

The system is built from modular robotic devices. Two of them carry most of the work: modular robotic tiles and the cubic I-BLOCKS. Each device gives immediate feedback on physical interaction, so a user can start without any knowledge of the application behind it, and parameters can be changed on the fly to alter the stimulus.

Lund pitched the combination of artificial intelligence, modular robotics and entertainment as a way into play, rehabilitation, sport, music and teaching for people who are not technology experts. One concrete form was a multi-sensory room for hospitals, where the user is drawn into physical activity.

Three setups were shown: robotic tiles for cardiac rehabilitation at the hospital Sygehus Fyn Svendborg, a child with autism playing on the tiles, and children making music with I-BLOCKS.

In November 2026 the Center for Playware's own web address, playware.elektro.dtu.dk, no longer loads. DTU's research portal still lists the center as the research context of later work, among them a 2016 doctoral thesis by Moises Pacheco on Fable, a modular robot for education that the abstract reports was tested with more than 500 students in schools, after-school clubs and research labs.

The tiles and I-BLOCKS therefore have no current center page to point to, and the descriptions above rest on the 2010 talk and the sources named here.