Virtual violin produces realistic sounds

90s physical modelling was a very simplified modular kind of modelling. Instead of analogue oscillators and filters you had "string" models, "pipe" models, various resonators, and so on.

The models were interesting, but still quite crude and basic.

This project is the most physical kind of physical modelling. It's an unsimplified brute-force model of the entire instrument body and string system, in full.

It doesn't try to "model a resonator", it models blocks of wood with various holes, and calculates how they distort and radiate as sound passes through them.

It's ridiculously expensive computationally, but it's also the only way to get all of the nuances of the sound.

I expect they're already working on a stick-slip model for bowing.

Theoretically you could use the same technique to model a piano or guitar, and you would get something indistinguishable from a real instrument.

You'd likely need a supercomputer to run the model in anything approaching real time.

But the advantage is that once you've got it you can do insane things like replace the strings with wood instead of metal, or use different metals, or "build" nonphysical pianos that are fifty feet long and have linear overtones all the way down to the bass.