Sesame Street’s next chapter: Elmo, Big Bird in two-way talk

NEW YORK — Elmo, Big Bird and the rest of the “Sesame Street” crew have always talked to kids. Now, they’ll try to have a two-way conversation with their pint-sized audience using Kinect, the motion and voice-sensing controller created by Microsoft.

“Kinect Sesame Street TV,” out Tuesday, is not exactly a video game, though it runs on the Xbox 360 video game system. There are no winners and losers, no real rules to follow and no points to score. If you don’t want to play, that’s fine. Just sit back and watch “Sesame Street,” as kids have for the past 43 years. But if you do play, Grover will count coconuts you’ve thrown, the Count will praise you for standing still and Elmo will catch a talking ball if you throw it to him.

The episodes presage the next step in the evolution of television, adding an interactive element to what’s still a passive, lean-back experience. The game is sure to arouse jealous feelings among football fans who yell at their TV sets during Sunday’s game. As you watch children playing the “Sesame Street” game, it’s easy to imagine a not-so-distant future where viewers become participants, affecting a show’s outcome —much more than they do when they vote for “American Idol” contestants.

“Kinect Sesame Street” ‘’allows the child to participate in the narrative plot,” says Emory Woodard, communications professor at Villanova University in Pennsylvania. Woodard, who worked at Children’s Television Workshop — what is now Sesame Workshop — in 1995, notes that a lot of TV programming aimed at preschoolers involves characters talking to the kids. “But in this case,” he adds, “The characters can react to the child’s response.”

It’s not entirely clear, though, whether that makes a difference to them.

“That’s a research question to explore,” Woodard says.

Two-and 3-year-olds, he notes, are at a very “ego-centric” stage of development. They already experience on-screen characters as if they were talking to them, even with traditional television programs. They start growing out of that around 4, but by 5 they’ll have more or less grown out of “Sesame Street,” too. (“Kinect Sesame” is recommended for children 3 and up).

Microsoft recently gave The Associated Press and several bloggers an early look at “Kinect Sesame.” Jack and Zoe Shyba, the 5 and 4-year-old kids of mommy blogger Jessica Shyba, at first just watched the show intently when they saw it at the Sesame Workshop in New York. The letter of the day, as it happens, was “S.” But as soon the characters started to ask them to do things, they obliged.

Kinect works by first calibrating to users’ bodies so it can track their movements when they throw a virtual ball to an on-screen character or pluck virtual carrots from Elmo’s garden. (Kinect is also used to play more traditional video games and control entertainment features on the Xbox).

With teenagers and adults, this means moving your body into various poses that are reflected by a bare-bones figure on screen. — AP