Kinect opens Sesame

GAMES FOR TV: Microsoft set up Soho Studios as a ‘disruptive project’ to foster innovation around its motion- and voice-controlled Xbox 360 Kinect games console. Senior design director Josh Atkins tells Jonathan Webdale how it is reinventing Sesame Street.

Kinect Sesame Street

Cookie Monster has a tough life. He spends his time trying to help kids he assumes are watching to learn things like the ‘letter of the day,’ but when his shift is done and he heads home to get loaded on choc chip nibbles he can’t be entirely sure whether his efforts have really had any effect.

But Cookie Monster’s life is about to change thanks to an alliance between his parent Sesame Workshop and Microsoft. The pair got together in October to turn Sesame Street into something it always set out to be: a truly interactive television show for children.

People have been yelling at their TV screens for years, calling out the answers to gameshows or swearing at referees’ decisions. In the case of Sesame Street, the show’s makers have always hoped attentive children are shouting out answers to questions posed by the likes of Cookie Monster, Elmo and Grover.

Thanks to the latest update to Microsoft Xbox 360 consoles fitted with Kinect motion sensor technology, it is now possible for such emotional outbursts to actually affect the on-screen action.

Through a new London-based unit called Soho Studios, Microsoft is working with Sesame Workshop and others on how such truly interactive TV capabilities can help transform entertainment. The first fruit of these endeavours will be Kinect Sesame Street TV, due out this autumn.

“With Sesame Street from 1969 onwards, the characters have looked out of the TV and asked the kids a question and assumed they were answering,” explains Soho Studios’ senior design director Josh Atkins. “What we’ve done is allowed kids to answer.”

The addition of voice control to Kinect came only recently but is expected to spread as others such as Apple move into the TV space, likely bringing its own Siri voice control technology to the living room. Motion sensor control is better established, having been pioneered by Nintendo Wii. Xbox 360 with Kinect offers both and so Microsoft set up Soho Studios last year to lead the way in content innovation.

“With Sesame Street, we’re taking the TV show everybody grew up with and actually turning it into an interactive experience using filmed puppets – the characters all the kids have come to know and love – and allowing the kids to directly interact with them,” says Atkins.

Josh Atkins

He takes the example of a game called The Letter Tree, in which the ever-hungry Cookie Monster is desperate for his next meal. Everything that grows on the tree starts with a particular letter and it’s only if the kids at home jump up and down that these fruits fall and Cookie Monster gets his reward.

“The characters on the screen actually know what the child has done, they respond to the child’s actions,” says Atkins. “Kids at one point believed they were talking to the TV but the TV would only kind of respond. Now the TV responds.”

Around 75% of what Soho Studios is doing is in motion sensor control and around 25% is voice. Atkins says that Microsoft is only beginning to scratch the surface of what’s possible. “When the TV show actually knows what you’ve done and acknowledges it, that changes everything,” he says.

Soho started out as a “disruptive project – something that would gather attention and have people start thinking about what was possible across multiple audiences and multiple types of programming.”

The message seems to be getting through. “We’ve talked to all sorts of people. None of them are public conversations at this point but there is a lot of interest around what we’re doing that goes well beyond children’s educational television.”

In the latter space, a pact with National Geographic Wild was announced at the same time as the one with Sesame Workshop and products from it will be released in parallel – first via Xbox Live and then on DVD.

Atkins points out that not only is it possible to create new forms of programming from scratch but to retrofit such interactivity on to library shows as well. “The sky’s the limit. I don’t think there’s anything that can’t be done,” he says.

Recent research from Nielsen reveals how the addition of Kinect to the Xbox 360 is pushing it out of children’s bedrooms and into the communal living room. The addition of motion- and voice-control to what we think of today as TV shows will push entertainment and education closer to gaming, transforming the TV set into something we have always wanted it to be: a device that responds to the emotions its output stirs up in us. Cookie Monster will never go hungry again.