I got some really helpful emails from people after they watched yesterday’s video. It’s sort of an odd process showing demos of things that do not (and cannot) yet exist. The entire enterprise is balanced on the interstices between science, education, human/computer interface, and stage magic.
My general hope is that the parts of the demonstration that are real (that is, the demo is actually doing what the audience believes it is doing), can expand over time, while the part that is stage magic can gradually fade away as we learn how to replace it by the real thing.
This approach — create an illusion of the way you would like things to be, and then gradually replace the illusion by reality, as you learn how to do that — is related to the “Wizard of Oz” research experiments. Except in this case we are hoping to eventually get rid of the Wizard of Oz aspects.