Practically, though, the UX in that demo was terrible. The frame rate was entirely insufficient. The latency between tapping and action taking place was too long. The idea was absolutely great and way ahead of its time, but it was also way ahead of the hardware's capabilities.

We saw a lot of great ideas in the 90s, but either the hardware performance wasn't ready, or the software effort fell short of the polish needed for mass adoption. We had to wait for the iPhone to be one of those rare products where they used capable hardware AND actually finished the software.