The Higgs VM is part of Maxime Chevalier's PhD work.You can find her blog here: http://pointersgonewild.wordpress.com/category/higgs/.

It's a PhD research project. See the project overview page for specifics:

http://pointersgonewild.wordpress.com/higgs/

In some air.mozilla.org talk the author said that this research was very unconventional and if successfull could bring generic yet not marginal perf improvements in a lot of languages.

It's a research project so it produces experience and, well, research that can be useful to commercial enterprises. Lots of companies have an interest in making dynamic languages faster.

The project does have a secondary goal be a useful hobbyist platform and is making progress on that front.

(disclaimer: I'm a minor contributor.)

> does this serve a commercial purpose?

I'm sure the high paying job offers will be coming in thick and fast.