[mturk]

I don't think that it's fair to compare the rendering to what is currently in use in the scientific community, for two main reasons:

The first is that different types of rendering have different uses; typically in scientific visualization this is broken down into essentially "viz for self, viz for peers, viz for others" and oftentimes the most well-used rendering engines are targeted squarely at the first and second categories. The visual language in those categories is qualitatively different than that used for more "outward facing" renderings.

The second reason is that I disagree with your assertion about the quality of the visualization techniques in use within science. There are some truly spectacular visualization engines for cosmology and galaxy formation -- just to pick two examples off the top of my head, the work done by Ralf Kaehler or that by Dylan Nelson. (There are many really good examples, however, and I feel guilty not mentioning more.)

As I said in another, rather terse and unelaborated comment, though, this is really, really impressive work. I think it's important that in praising it, however, we don't discount the work that's been done elsewhere. This need not be zero-sum.

[apetrov]

I don’t mean to discount any other work. I have already disclaimed that I don’t work in academia and rely on second-hand feedback from my classmates (in Europe)—for example, the Fortran implementation of Yoshida’s method from N years ago that nobody could modify, or the pressure for publication. Building (or learning) a new rendering engine would be a losing strategy in an academic career, as it is a much more difficult path to getting published. There are far fewer postdoc positions than PhD positions, and rendering skills won’t help in this competition.

Regarding the work of Ralf Kaehler: I have seen his renderings and looked through his articles, but to the best of my knowledge, no source code is publicly available. I don’t consider it fair to count it as something actively used in the field, beyond his lab and affiliated projects.

Disclaimer: that doesn't mean that there are no others, but their availability to researchers is limited to be widely spread.