Wow, Mirai. Haven't heard that name in a long time. So many good stuff came out of it. It just wasn't received widely for some reason. I got a demo CD from nichimen with it, I bet I still have it somewhere.
This is Mirai: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubgvomRTW80 Here is Bay Raitt working with it. Note the year. Also note that is the guy that worked on Golum (and later at Valve). Modeling in that video seems like a normal workflow by today's standards, however at the time NURBS/Patch modeling was all the rage and box modeling was a novelty most users were skeptical of. Mirai provided workflow which pushed it onto a new level. Prior to that Lightwave had something similar with its MetaNURBS.
IIRC, it was a time when Maya finally caught on (ver 2 I believe) and new Softimage (codename Sumatra, later XSI) was getting adopted too. Interesting fact is that Softimage bought nichimen's modeling toolset and integrated it into XSI.
So many firsts were spawned from Mirai. Some due to technical achievements/features, some by its users. Bridge poly tool comes to mind, and of course, box modeling pioneered by Bay Raitt and Mirai peers for production. Truly defining time for 3D. A year later we all learned about skybox/GI/FG, and a couple of years later Zbrush came out. Nothing was the same anymore.
ZBrush was an amazing piece of software when it came out. I stopped following developments in 3d graphics around the time that happened, but I remember that most of the remaining Mirai users active on the web back then moved over to it.
Dave Cooper of Genworks (http://www.genworks.com) told me that he met some of the Mirai developers (they're still around: http://www.izware.com/) at a conference not too long ago, and that they're working on the next iteration of Mirai.
A next generation Mirai ? Wow... wasn't even aware that this company trully still exist, since they seem dead for almost 10 years now (no update or anything).
Funny thing is that, since it's in Common Lisp, when there's a problem, you were dumped into the debugger, which was scary... only now do I know that it's an amazing opportunity to access the underlying system in fact !
Ah yes, the mythical Mirai 1.5! I'm afraid nothing will ever come of it. Last update to anything from Izware(nichimen) was in 2005 and even then was a bit of a surprise and it was an update to Nendo. Mirai belongs to the history now. We now have far superior software and features than we had with Mirai, but Mirai was still a cool concept.
Mirai was written all in common-lisp. Wings3D, inspired by Mirai, is written in Erlang.