Thats so original, I remember they said the same about the Wii and look how that turned out to be.

I'm not sure but something tells me you do.

another ricochet demo??? the title said pointer screen display

is ricochet the new rickroll now?

Two things.

What distance from the camera is he giving this estimation. ?

Secondly, the depth accuracy is around 2cm at the back end of Natal's range, this gives credence to that estimation.  I would hope that MS devs do not fuzzify the xy accuracy by a factor of 5 on the optimistic view, and 13 on the unoptimistic at 2m.

This is a video MS should at any cost bury if it wishes to play the cool factor.

@JaggedSac
1) don't really know. I don't have access to the New Scientist article, and I only know the numbers from the article I linked. So I assumed it was an average scenario.
2) 4cm^3/2cm would mean 2cm^2 on the xy plane at far end of depth range, or 1.4cm linear error. Thus the resolution loss factor would be more 4.5 than 3. But it's still reasonable as it would mean having a 4-5 camera pixel margin of error on where the limb node is detected. Looks perfectly fine to me, as a wrist would be about 20-25 camera px wide and we're talking of fuzzy logic trying to pinpoint where the proper limb node is to be placed in that span.

Let's even say that 4cm^3 applies at top range, you still have a 0.7cm linear accuracy on xy plane at half that distance, ie you're still around 10 pixels of error on screen. And I've been very generous in using a meter wide space for pointing... to be comfortable you will probably only use about half of that, thus getting half the accuracy.

As I said, even assuming the best from the numbers we're told it sounds precise enough for GUIs, but certainly not as much as a wiimote for games requiring fast and precise pointing.

That damn lag is destroying it. Without lag Natal would be incredible but with the 200ms lag we've seen so far it looks nearly unplayable.

I would say 1 meter is at the lower end of the space you would want to use to interact with a GUI using your hand as a pointer, regardless of accuracy. Once you get below that you are mapping small hand movements to big movements on screen and you get the reverse effect of having bad camera accuracy. A gestural based system would be better for smaller hand movements.

To be comfortable, you would want to use, IMHO, a two hand system where each hand can interact with an imaginary plane positioned in front of you, centered on the head. This allows for a larger area of interaction, and is somewhat intuitive.

As far as accuracy is concerned, we shall see.

^With a proper acceleration curve people can easily use a mouse or trackpad over a few inches of real space to map a computer screen at pixel-scale accuracy. Usability-wise moving your forearm from your hip over no more than say 60 degrees per axis is much less tiring than having to move your hands all over a huge virtual vertical plane.
But of course only time will tell, though I'd have thought that a shooter or RTS would have appeared among Natal tech demos if pointing implementations were trivial.

Keep in mind that Natal is measuring your hand position.  Moving a tiny amount with your mouse is much, much different than moving your hand a tiny amount in free space.

And there aren't tech demos of shooter(other than that Half-Life video) or RTS games as Natal is not aimed at that audience.  95% of games launched at release will be casual/party games.