redditor shares a story about a David Copperfield illusion, and the man himself shows up and explains it to him. Nobody notices

The thing with giving people the flashlights is supposed to show to the audience that the people in the box are still in their chairs and not moving around. If they faked the flashlights, they'd cover time to quickly empty the people through the floor as soon as the curtain goes down and before the platform. The "participants" who hold the big flashlights through the edges of the curtain are probably assistants who came up through the floor once the real 12 people exited through. There looks like enough room in the floor of the platform for the two assistants to conceal themselves in before they pull the curtains at the end. Assistants hiding in secret panels built into floors and walls that are thicker than they look is how a lot of stage acts are pulled off.

The only thing that's hard to explain with standard stage act capabilities is how the participants move so quickly from (beneath the) stage to behind the audience without them being in on it or knowing how they moved so fast. Just going from that info, I would start thinking that the room they were in managed to move from under the stage to close to where they were revealed without much jostling and noise. The sound from the show would probably mask a little sound, and after being shoved through a hole and whisked down darkened stairs and confused you might not notice if the room shook a little while it moved. I'd start thinking maybe pneumatics, or a rail and some kind of electric motor. It sounds somewhat unlikely but possible. But if you say magnets might be part of the secret, I'm immediately thinking some kind of magnetic drive, like newer roller coasters have. Roller coasters used to ka-chunka-chunka their way up the first hill as a chain drive pull the cars up the hill, but new ones are practically silent and extremely smooth because the driving belt connects to the cars by magnet.

I think you could use a system like that to rig up a room that moved along a rail like that pretty quickly without people inside knowing it ever moved. It would be a very expensive contraption to build, and absolutely could not be taken on the road, but for a Vegas show with 4 performances a day every day for years in a custom auditorium built specifically for that show and nothing else, that's no problem.

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