I finally had some time to program a simple behavior using the new distance sensor. The robot follows whatever is in front of it, trying to keep a constant distance. When the object disappears, it stops and looks around for it. See the video:

One thing that made it a little challenging is that the output from this sensor is very noisy. I worked around that by keeping the last 10 measurements in a queue, and using the average of them -- a kind of a low-pass filter.