[contingencies]

Can I ask if your skepticism is specific to this project, or to the idea of a distributed, programmable VR platform?

Well, I've been down the same path before, as with others here .. judging by the earlier comments. I don't discount 3D, far from it, however my conclusion, personally, was that different people consider different types of visualizations preferable or inherantly clearer. For instance, a statistician, mathematician, programmer, poet, sculptor or gamer may wish to visualize or interact with the same information in a very different way. If you accept this temporarily for the sake of argument, then take those same different input/interaction paradigms and start to translate them across multiple cultures and languages, I believe you get an even higher number of preferences. Trying to create the one true standard for interaction with mock-physical representations of aphysical notions may just be trying to put a square peg in a round hole.