NEW YORK — Three nights a week at 7 p.m., Manhattan cable Channel 37 cuts from the chat show "Realty Views" to a spinning green orb with a message: "Fly the Electronic Neighborhood."

For the next hour, about a dozen home viewers use their telephone key pads to navigate a 3-D world studded with graphic icons--a bicycle, a tree, a paintbrush, a Zen temple--that contain multimedia fare.

They tour a Russian palace, peruse a cable TV guide, hear full-motion sound bites of New York Gov. Mario Cuomo nominating Bill Clinton for President.

They draw multicolored lines, watch a guy describe his bike route in Queens, read pro-feminist, anti-homeless, happy-birthday and get-well messages, view an animated film about civil rights.

It may not seem like much, but participants in this New York University experiment are pioneers in interactive television--a field larded with hype but also the potential to change America's couch culture in the 21st Century.

Scores of companies are promoting the first wave of offerings. Countless start-ups have ideas but no money. Corporate partnering occurs almost daily. Newspapers describe the possibilities with wide-eyed fascination.

There's one catch: For consumers, interactivity is still mostly talk.

"We should have known that any revolution involving the media would be the most thoroughly analyzed and over-hyped revolution of them all," said Wired, a trendy techno-magazine. It placed "Interactive Everything" No. 2 on its "Hype List" in a recent issue.

The term grows broader daily. Are round-the-clock soap opera reruns really interactive, as one company claims, just because a viewer can choose when to watch? Does interactivity mean something more complex, like controlling what happens on screen or supplying program content?

"We're trying to get away from choice," said Red Burns, who chairs the NYU graduate program that developed the "Electronic Neighborhood." "More interesting is that you can manipulate, you can move around, you can create."

Industry, however, is driven by sales. Commercial tests will accelerate this year, allowing consumers to order movies, shop electronically, browse encyclopedias, and play along with sports events and quiz shows.

Technology in a short time promises much more: "Virtual" tours of vacation spots. Traffic reports that let viewers manipulate cameras mounted alongside busy routes. Video catalogues showing how a consumer looks in an L.L. Bean sweater or Giorgio Armani suit.