Anyone who hasn’t experienced it yet should go to Google Maps, find a local mall with a Build-a-Bear Workshop and go make a bear. Sure, the stuffed little adorables can be a little bit on the expensive side, but it’s an experience worth having and the end product isn’t just a t-shirt.

Well, the bear-stuffing and accessorizing experience just got more interesting.

Microsoft and Build-a-Bear have partnered to pave the way for Build-a-Bear Kinect-enabled bears. This is part of the new Kinectimals with Bears Xbox 360 game due for releaseOctober 11, 2011. Kinectimals carries on the tried-and-true videogame concept of rendering virtual animals on-screen and then rendering them as pets for the players to gambol and caper with. It just introduces the Kinect hands-free controller system.

Some of the new Build-a-Bear Workshop bears will be Kinect-enabled via a hangtag that can be scanned by the Kinect camera, which will then render the bear in Kinectimals. This makes the bear an avatar that players—children and adult-children alike—can interact with in the game just like any other critter.

Currently, only four template bears are enabled and can be bought from the Build-a-Bear Workshop, they are: Champ – A Champion Fur Kids™, Colorful Hearts Bear, Endless Hearts Teddy, and Peace& Hearts Bear.

The Microsoft Kinect system has already seen its heyday of explosive popularity and it continues to be the center of a multitude of games that wouldn’t work without its innovative interface. The addition of bears that can be used in a Kinect game shows off its capability of generating augmented reality and promotes the Internet of Things (real-to-virtual things in this case) and I can see how it could even be connected into the Kinect Fun Labs interactive media experiment. In a lot of ways, I found myself surprised it didn’t use the Kinect Fun Labs object scanning function, after all, why enable only four bear templates when the came could be programmed to recognize all bears just by the initial look of them.

As with other Kinect game frameworks, Kinectimals uses skeletal recognition for where the player’s hands happen to be—so it got me thinking—it would also be interesting to use the teddy bear in the game itself. Hold it in front of the camera, move it around. Also, the technology exists to detect some facial expressions, meaning that a frown or a smile could affect the behavior of the Kinectimal on screen.

Feeling sad? Go look mopy at your Kinectimal Bengal tiger and she’ll romp over to rub your cheek and purr for you.

An ode to the future of virtual animal companionship.

As for the bears, expect to see these stuffed-critters appearing in a mall near you that supports a Workshop come mid-October.