In the 1990s I was was the junior co-founder and, for a while, main developer of VMD, a program for molecular visualization. I wanted to include molecular surface visualization, but me being me, would rather integrate someone else's good work.
I looked around and found "Surf", a molecular surface solver written by Amitabh Varshney when he was at the University of North Carolina. (See "Computing Smooth Molecular Surfaces", IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/310720 .)
Brooks, you may not know, heard Sutherland talk about using the screen as a window into another world, which got Brooks interested in VR. Back in the 1970s, at UNC, they started experimenting with head-mounted displays. Brooks worked on VR for the rest of his career.
The UNC VR group worked on many different VR approaches, including haptic (tactile) feedback. As I recall, the first was a used hydraulic-powered robot arm. People had to wear a lab coat and helmet when using it because it would leak, and had a tendency to hit people.
One of the experiments, the NanoManipulator, hooked up the VR and haptic feedback (not that same robot!) to an atomic-force microscope, so people could feel the surface and move nanoscale objects around. http://www.warrenrobinett.com/nano/ .
Brooks felt that VR would be very useful for molecular visualization, and developed the GRIP Molecular Graphics Resource. Quoting https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA236598.pdf , some of its early achievements were "the first molecular graphics system on which a protein was solved without a physical model", "using remote manipulator technology to enable users to feel molecular forces", and "Real-time, user-steered volume visualization of an electron density map".
As that document points out, their goal was to "wildcat radical new molecular graphics ideas to the prototype stage. Winning ideas are spun off to the thriving commercial industry or into autonomous research projects."
Surf fit very well in those lines, as VMD was an "autonomous research project".
My exchange with Brooks and UNC was 1) to get permission to distribute Surf as part of the VMD distribution, and, 2) a few years later, to provide numbers about how many people had downloaded VMD with Surf.