Wow, it's not often that I see something that makes me sad I wasn't the one who implemented it, but damn this is one of those. Beautiful and elegant, really nice. Thanks for linking to it.
This takes me back to high school when a friend and I goofed around with spatial navigation through hierarchical structures. Of course that was in the era of the 486, and we had no idea what we were doing, trying to build something based on vector graphics with Pascal on DOS... so this was what we were dreaming of but couldn't make (nor properly articulate).
Code envy: yes indeed! :) Apart from the nice graphical touches like animating the branches and zooming and whatnot, the node-based navigation looks like a win for dealing with scale issues.
It's also nice that he abstracted the layout so thoroughly that he can not only create a variety of 2D and 3D views, but also map the underlying data structure onto actual game elements in the game's main display, as you can see in one or two of the other demo videos.
This takes me back to high school when a friend and I goofed around with spatial navigation through hierarchical structures. Of course that was in the era of the 486, and we had no idea what we were doing, trying to build something based on vector graphics with Pascal on DOS... so this was what we were dreaming of but couldn't make (nor properly articulate).