AppleFan: just the info I was looking for (although DTW weren't letters I cared to see).
PremEx: inclinators wouldn't be quite what I had in mind, as their movement is, what's the word, planar, essentially 2d. What the Otis Odyssey project focused on was (this quoted from Richard Leifer, et al., Radical Innovation, HBS Press, 2000) - "Over 50 years ago Frank Lloyd Wright designed a mile-high building ... [that] could not be constructed until the problem of moving the people was solved. A single elevator shaft was not a solution due to the weight of the cable. Multiple shafts consumed too much available 'real estate' of the building. ... Why not allow the elevator cab to detach from the shaft and move horizontally to a second shaft? ... ... Since the innovation required that elevator cars disembark from the vertical shaft, any single car's journey could be customized to navigate through a building or series of buildings and tunnels. ..." So what we're talking about is an elevator that has a three-dimensional route. Kind of interesting, to me at least.