When even industry insiders think of virtual reality systems,
and of the data visualisation sector in particular, it's the
larger, multi-user data worlds with relatively exotic hardware
that tend to leap straight into mind, as opposed to the single
user software suites that process and display data in 2D or 3D
form. Yet, the latter is still a form of virtual reality,
crafting worlds from numbers and formulae alone. Their larger
brethren owe much to them, as the algorithms that drive hair
movement, advanced buffer techniques, compression, dynamic
lighting and more, all came from the research environments
dedicated to number crunching and displaying. It is no accident
that our understanding and use of such intensively mathematical
structures, in VR and in unrelated outside fields, has lept
forwards like never before, since mathematical model crunchers
that work far, far faster than the human brain, became popular.
One such number cruncher, is Mathematica. Mathematica is one of
the older research visualisation t