[mullr]

Another thing I wonder is, if their "search" system, what kind of indexing is required? How long does it take, and can you re-index on the fly? Their demos have a conspicuous lack of any kind of movement at all, much less dynamic geometry.

And what about shading? Shading typically require surface normals, something that's not readily available from a mess of points in 3d.

[noonespecial]

Shading in particle systems (when its addressed at all) usually involves making a topo-map like structure out of the points and then creating virtual polys out of the contours. You can then apply shading to groups of points contained in the virtual polys based on those surface normals. It takes lots and lots of cpu. Decidedly not like the "it'll run on your cell phone without a GPU" hype presented here.

My guess is that they created a small static particle system that looks like 3d figure, "rotated" it by selectively displaying particles and got all excited.

A classic case of needing to be an expert in a field before trying to push the state of the art in order to save yourself the trouble of chasing a dead end that most people in said field already know is infeasible.