It looks like they are saying that the technology's maturing so that it can be applied to commercial systems rather than a specialised application, thus providing a new method of learning and interaction etc within the environment that previously may have only played a small part of the overall game due to computational and interactivity limitations.

As for when something is new, well that's a big question that would take a lot of discussion, stuff is researched for years before being released, so is it right to call it new when it becomes commercially available? Or is it new at the theory/proof of concept/simulation or prototype level??

Maybe they should have used "newer" instead?