haha, links to paper and thesis doesn't work, but you can find the pd external over there. Nonetheless, it is better resided these days at
https://github.com/pd-externals/vbap for reference.
There's an external for SC which seems to work the same way
There's also the CICM tools library, that I uploaded to deken a few years ago
Now, I also found that the 'ssr' library has a vbap option, but I still couldn't test it.
Also, good reference for spatialization tutorials and stuff is highly welcome.
my questions still remain, will keep investigating further