But Mark Pesce's new book is far more than a cannily timed shill for the toy industry. Pesce, the founding chair of the interactive media program at the University of Southern California's School of Cinema-Television, is an eloquent geek optimist, firmly in the tradition of Buckminster Fuller, who hopes to bestow a future of technological breakthroughs on the minds of our children. "The Playful World" isn't a buying guide for the holidays; it is a utopian explanation of the concepts underpinning virtual reality, robotics and artificial intelligence that just happens to conflate cutting-edge technology with consumer culture and offer it up as one big steaming plate of good-for-you oatmeal.

As Pesce muses, "Today, we and our children are amazed by a synthetic creature possessing a dim image of our own consciousness and announcing the advent of a playful world, where the gulf between wish and reality collapses to produce a new kind of creativity."

So despite what the book jacket blurb declares, toys are not the focus of "The Playful World"; they are merely a jumping-off point to talk about future technological wonders. Pesce begins with Furby and walks us through robot toys like the Sony AiBo and the upcoming robot doll My Real Baby (which leads into a discussion of robotics and artificial intelligence), the Lego Mindstorms toys (which draw us into the world of nanotechnology), the Web (the notion of databases of "collective intelligence") and video games and virtual reality (VRML, haptic interfaces and so on).

If you're coming to this book because you think you'll learn about a lot of whiz-bang gadgets that you can buy for your kids, you'll be disappointed: Pesce mentions only a handful of toys that you'll find at your local high-end K-Mart (and most of these are listed above). Instead, he focuses his energies on fun future applications of modern technology that are only just now emerging from the research stage: robots that are still half-assembled at the MIT Media Lab, a Web-controlled Ouija Board, an obscure art exhibit that lets 20 users a day "float" in a virtual reality environment. Much of the playful world he envisions is still several decades away.

Pesce's future is decidedly utopian. He enjoys envisioning an anonymous "millennial child," who he imagines nurturing a robot baby to adulthood, saving the planet after playing an environmental simulation game and becoming a molecular engineer after twiddling with a nanotechnology toy. Technological innovations that we are still dreaming up, declares Pesce, will allow this child to boast "creative abilities beyond any we have ever known"; will enable access to "a shared digital imagination where we can experiment with the forms of the future." And, even more ambitiously, he believes that those intelligent, perceptive robot buddies will "help us raise better, more caring people from the infinite possibilties of childhood."

Even today's more modest gadgets are viewed through rose-tinted glasses. Take, for example, the Playstation 2, a networked video game system with impressive graphics due to debut in the United States at the end of October. Pesce describes the console's capabilities and then effuses about its potential influence on our psyche: "The Playstation 2 becomes more than a toy; it becomes a window onto a wider world, a web of worlds, each more fantastic than the one preceding it."

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