The visualizations look great, but wouldn't run on an N64, which had many physics games. I'm wondering the same thing as the OP--was this advanced level of graphics used during the research, or was the styling added after the fact for readers? A low res visualization seems like it would do the job equally well, but maybe not. Curious what they are finding and whether there are benefits to having a great looking visualization during the EDA phase.

An accurate 3D visualization could have been a lot simpler than this. The actors are most likely modeled physically as simple cylinders; all the character animations are extraneous. And there's plenty of subtle effects in the seekers' vision cones, the reflective floor, the uneven box landscape outside, etc.

So, as tlb said, I'm curious if all of that was added for the public release, or if the researchers set it up while running the experiments. It seems like it would be fun.