[Darlin']

Well, of course, it would hurt you, probably seriously, if one ran into you. Heck, a tricycle powered by a toddler can hurt you if caught off guard. And true enough we don't know "what went on before the cameras were turned on" but I don't think they had anything to gain, they weren't selling them. Robin Roberts, a former athlete, seemed to have lots of fun with it and the same for Diane Sawyer.. Sawyer is certainly not an athlete or mechanically inclined, in fact, she is something of a klutz. They were just having a good time with it and asked some of the right questions. For instance they wanted to know when or if the price would be coming down. LOL

[discostu]

They didn't have anything to gain, but by the same token having one of their multimillion dollar hosts bust his face on national TV probably is something they'd like to avoid.

I'm sure they're tons of fun. Doesn't mean they're useful. And Kamen doesn't seem to be marketing them as toys, he's marketing them as something useful. Hopefully these things will be successful enough for a racing circuit to form around them, that's about the best future I can see for them though.

[supercat]

And true enough we don't know "what went on before the cameras were turned on" but I don't think they had anything to gain, they weren't selling them.

A bigger question in my mind is what constitutes "mastery". I'm sure the training environment was carefully configured so and the training carefully scripted as to make the device look good. Any obstacles the device would have to overcome were probably deliberately chosen so as to be as large as possible while being within the device's ability to handle smoothly.

Really, there are many skills for which 90% mastery is both fairly easy and quite useless. If one scripts a demo so as to avoid the "hard" 10%, such skills can be made to look easy. Anyone who tries them in the real world, however, will discover that the 10% is tough.