Watching TV is old news. Now it can watch you back, provided you have one of two new titles in stores: Kinect Sesame Street TV or Kinect Nat Geo TV ($30 each, from Microsoft Studios).
The catch is that you need Microsoft's $250 Xbox 360 Kinect video game system to make them work. Each title bundles television episodes from the 2011-12 season with games that invoke Kinect's motion-sensing camera and microphone. Additional episodes, offered for sale from the main menu, cost $5 each and require both an Xbox Live account and free hard disk space.
The Sesame Street package contains two themed disks on growing up and science. Each disk contains four 30-minute episodes of the show. After you move your coffee table to the side and calibrate your Kinect, you'll see yourself inside an on-screen mirror with Elmo or Grover, who might ask you to jump to shake coconuts from a tree or wave to pop the bubbles floating on the screen. There's no shortage of counting, sorting and waving, as you might expect.
In the Nat Geo title (also two disks with multiple episodes), you can explore the American wilderness with Casey Anderson, a wildlife expert, by shouting at the Kinect microphone, or become an onscreen bear with head and paws. You earn points by scratching rocks to scare up moths, snapping them from the air with your mouth. A second player can jump in simply by entering the camera's field of view, making this an excellent social experience. If you step out of the room or just get tired, your Xbox waits for about 45 seconds and then starts churning through the episode on autopilot. Call it the couch-potato mode.
