Minority Report's UI

Remember Tom Cruise moving stuff around on the screen in Spielberg's Minority Report?  The UI sucked, and here's why:  Tom wasn't touching anything.

Think about it.  He was waving his arms around in front of him, but never resisting against any solid surface.  This means the computer has no way of knowing that he's pushing his arm forward to mean "computer, I want to zoom in on this document" or "my arm is getting tired and I want to stretch it", or even just "I didn't mean to push forward there, I was actually focusing on a right/left motion but accidentally pushed my arm forward".

It's a UI nightmare because the system needs to know when you're navigating and when you want to make an action.  Imagine if every time your mouse hovered over a document, it opened it.  Total bedlam from a UX standpoint.  Much better to require two different actions, one to navigate over, another to actually do something.  Tom Cruise's display doesn't offer this.  Which is odd, because they got so much right in those scenes, just not the actual position of the person's arms.  It was probably done for Hollywood maximum effect.

Minority Report-like touch screen displays are actually coming, and allow you to do more with fewer mistakes.  I just caught this new Han video and I'm giddily awaiting my iPhone so I can have some of this magic in my daily life:
http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid271543545/bctid422563006