One of them, Rear Admiral Simon Lister, is in charge of this complex programme, and as he took me round the cramped corridors, past the nuclear reactor and down into the sweaty machine rooms, he acknowledged this was a prototype and there was always going to be some "teething" issues.
His propeller-based hoverboard is still only in the working prototype stages, and there is no word yet on whether he plans to sell these human-carrying drones.
The projects that qualified for Smogathon Bootcamp are all at different phases of development: there are well-developed ideas, there are MVPs and working prototypes, and there are mature companies.
A SeaBubble Taxi prototype costs 140,000 euros and there is "a lot" of demand for more right now, Lambert said, clarifying that the company doesn't have thousands of orders.
The combination of talking to people (incremental prototypes) and iterative experiments (iterative prototypes), is called minimum viable products and there is not just one, there is a serious of them and they change over time.
Of course, our test group only contained 15 people (five per scenario), our prototype was on paper, and there were a number of other potential issues with our methodology, but the question and premise remain sound.
Let's say we've reached a point where most people know about and support Basic Income, and there are prototype programs showing it working.
The crystal structure of FIH-1 has been solved and there are prototype inhibitors implying it will be druggable (Banerji et al, 2005; McDonough et al, 2005; Moon et al, 2010).
And there are prototypes of tiny, ingestible devices that can do things like automatically open car doors or fill in passwords.
On the first floor, most of the larger prototypes and objects are made, and there are offices for the assistants who plan his schedule and handle his finances and for the architects, mathematicians, and graphic artists (his studio produces a couple of books a year) who work with him.
