I’m very skeptical that either one will work anywhere nearly as well as it shows in the videos. The Natal demo is obviously complete faked with pre-rendered videos and people mimicking along with it and is just an example of what they think it’ll be able to do eventually.
What they don’t show is the person saying “Play movie” and the Xbox thinking they said something entirely different or them standing too close or too far away from the device or turning at the wrong angle and it losing the orientation of where they are standing and becoming worthless. It’s a gimmick for now, just like the Wii was and still is in some ways. When I have the option I still almost always choose to play the Wii like a normal controller. The motion sensitivity is still too poor and inaccurate for a lot of games. A camera trying to interpret human movement on the fly is going to be a whole lot worse. In the skateboarding game how is it supposed to know if you’re doing a kick flip or any of a dozen other moves that look very similar without know exactly how you are flipping your ankle or spinning the board?
Milo is a tech demo at best, no real game there so far. That reflection in the water thing is cool as a tech demo, but I would get bored with it in about 20 seconds unless it somehow has some effect on the gameplay. They ask him questions that they know he has the answers to so it looks very human-like, but a person walking up to it would quickly run into the walls of his abilities to understand the world and the person he is talking to.
Also these types of accessories are worthless if the developers don’t embrace them. It works for the Wii because the motion controllers are the default control type so the developers have to find a way to make them work. When it’s an expensive accessory that people have to buy, only a fraction of 360 owners will buy it, so developers don’t want to make games for it until there is a larger installed base, but people don’t want to buy the device until there is more games that support it. It’s a catch-22 that makes these sort of add-on accessories very difficult to be successful with.
So far I only see both of these things as a gimmick just like the EyeToy and all the other crazy controller prototypes that have come out over the years that don’t actually work and never have any games developed for them.