An emailer corrects me:
There’s no rings to put on the floor with Microsoft’s thing. You mistook the ugly carpet in the video for an actual peripheral, à la SEGA Activator. The rings were just a pattern on the carpet ;). Not that it makes Project Natal any less ridiculous, but still, you might want to rectify that.
You are correct, and I am doing it now. For those of you not familiar, I don’t go back and ‘edit’ previous posts or even articles. I prefer to let the mistakes hang out and do corrections more like this with updates addressing them. News is moving too fast these days to keep re-editing old stories. I want people to see my mistakes when I make them (like if they read something years ago and know it wasn’t quite right). A flawed author is one you know isn’t at a marketing company. So the rings were just a horrible carpet. Wonderful. I thought they were markings to show the zones the camera could detect or something. I couldn’t see the floor at E3 so I thought the Special Marketing Video (amazing how Microsoft spent so much money on an ad for a ‘technology demo’) portrayed the floor accurately.