Hi Ed, that exact thing in the video is not a great fit with MoI currently anyway since the result of the displacement that video is showing is all polygon/triangle mesh geometry and not NURBS geometry anymore.

Since it's basically a polygon modeling technique that's something that fits better with a polygon oriented modeler.

Some kind of "heightfield" command could be possible in the future though, right now if you want to build a NURBS surface with heights of the surface based off light/dark areas in a texture bitmap the ZSurf program can do that for you:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=3825.2

And also the new Flow command in MoI v3 is kind of related - it can map geometry from a base rectangle layout onto a curved surface.

- Michael