Hands-On, User-Friendly Entertainment : Technology: A new generation of electronic toys is allowing us to interact with what’s on TV and computer screens.

At Monday’s Academy Awards, Hollywood filmmakers celebrated themselves while also celebrating the 100th anniversary of motion pictures.

Then on Tuesday in a different clime, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that almost 75 million Americans, when last counted in 1989, were computer-friendly, capable of keyboarding on home PCs and office mainframes or joysticking their way with computer games. In five years this was a leap of 28 million users.

And this coming Tuesday, the three-day Home Media Expo in Hollywood’s play yard of Beverly Hills will be dedicated to “the start of the new entertainment industry,” computer and other electronic devices that have been designed solely to change the ways we amuse and entertain ourselves as well as how we spend our time and money.

Connect the dots and you begin to see that while the next 100 years might still belong to film, some things are changing rapidly. The audience for the new electronic toys is larger and growing more rapidly. The creative forces behind them are producing different ways of being entertained. Interactivity has become the keyword. We’ll have more to say about what is up on the screen, whether it’s a computer or a television screen. We move from passive to active.

The new entertainment makers are growing, becoming aggressive and in some cases more heavily financed in getting their messages and their products out to the public. The producers range from people who want to convert your computers and TV sets to home entertainment centers to the blue-sky crowd who envisions electronics changing reality itself, putting us into theaters of the minds.

Consider what Gordon Stulberg and his friends are about to do. Stulberg has touched all of Hollywood’s bases. A former president of 20th Century Fox and a former executive at CBS Television, he is now president of American Interactive Media, a joint operation of PolyGram Records and Dutch-based N.V. Philips. His current activity: a new form of home entertainment called CD-I, Compact Disc-Interactive. What he has is a collection of 5-inch CDs that look like normal, music-producing compact discs. They’re capable of doing just that, plus more. When programmed through a player linked to the home television set they also produce sound, pictures, animations and text. And they are interactive.

Stulberg’s project is the most immediate example of what these new technologies can do in linking us more closely to either computers or, in Stulberg’s case, the television set. He has five groupings of CD-Is, ranging from children’s to instructional to educational programs. The children’s discs, for example, feature the “Sesame Street” characters.

Starting this fall Stulberg’s company will be marketing the discs, offering the CD-I player under the Magnavox name at $1,000 and the discs from $20 to $50.

He is not alone, of course. A number of other electronic geniuses have had their interactive designs on home computers. IBM and Apple have gotten behind multimillion dollar software and hardware programs that are turning the PC into a combination concert hall-theater-school-resource tool. Time Warner is able to reach into its publishing and entertainment closets and produce, for example, an instant disc documentary on the Gulf War.

All of this will have an impact on Hollywood’s film, television and recording industries. The new 5-inch CDs may become a challenge to videocassettes because their picture and sound quality are improvements. As these technologies move forward and possibly grow into industries there will be greater employment opportunities for young, creative artists, people who have grown up with computer games and MTV graphics. The more time spent on these new toys, possibly the less time for the more traditional habits of moviegoing and television viewing.

The pull of time takes on new meaning when you get to the other extreme of the new technologies, the virtual reality crowd. At the Home Media Expo a panel of reality dabblers is prepared to proclaim the possible end of Hollywood’s “love machine,” the artificial reality of films and television and introduce their new “love machine,” the virtual reality equipment that allows people in real time to have new sensory experiences, to envision living in homes of their own designs, to give doctors the capability of traveling through the bodies of their patients in pursuit of illnesses.

The use of certain visual tools during the Gulf War showed how the new technologies are more than just space and flight simulators. They deliver a form of reality through electronic headpieces and gloves. In equipment already developed, participants are able through virtual reality to walk through and experience a new home, a new kitchen, to see how equipment works, how the layout functions, to redesign as necessary.

But how much of this brazen new world is merely virtual dreaming, electronic gimmickry gone berserk?

So many new toys, electronic and otherwise, have come and gone. So rapidly in recent times we’ve virtually put to rest LPs, Betamaxes, RCA VideoDiscs and 8-track tapes of blessed memory.

How the new toys may be different from those of the past is that they carry some new messages, their ability to let us be interactive, to respond to images and sounds and to go in the directions we choose.

The content of the message will be the major test of these media. If they truly stimulate the imagination and carry us into new frontiers and experiences, delighting and challenging us, no one will dare think to kill the messengers.