Jef Raskin was a proponent, and Aza continued his work. The Archy software implemented this along with other ideas: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy
I've been building something very similar to this ...but also quite different. The details (around usability) have proven very difficult to get right, but I'm really excited by how it's turning out. If you like the core idea as well and would be interested in taking part in a private beta, please send me an email (contact details in my profile). I expect it to be ready for others to try in maybe a few months.
I'm impressed. It's an intriguing paradigm for a navigation interface - and the implementation looks surprisingly fast. I wonder how it might work as a web browser..
Imagine what kind of structure would be visualized after being lost in Wikipedia for a few hours. It'd be neat to see it clustered by time, and you can jump back and forth to different parts of your history graph.
True, I suppose the web isn't structurally similar to a file system - at least until it gets to the website level. Maybe the navigator could show networks of nodes, grouped by themes/topics, with scaling proportional to popularity..
Interestingly, I just searched for "visualization of the world wide web", and most hits were articles from the 2000's - perhaps related to the image of "cyberspace", a term that's since fallen out of fashion.
I find the ZUI style navigation works particularly well for finding large files and folders- this requires weighing larger folders with a bigger size, rather than just representing each file in a static grid.
ZUIs have been long tried, and long failed. It’s a fun concept but is terrible in practice. We as humans don’t enter rooms by scaling down to a door’s keyhole to then go inside... it has a giant cognitive dissonance as a metaphor and is difficult to process. It’s far better to keep things at the same scale and manipulate as such.
I find this an interesting approach to the desktop metaphor, potentially one that can eliminate a lot of workflow issues related to the constrained screen space that I think has made spacial-oriented concepts a problematic.
I'm curious about the resource requirements and how it works with applications not in focus.
This reminds me a lot of fsn[1] (the file manager shown in Jurassic park in the classic "It's a UNIX system" scene). There is also a clone for more modern systems called fsv[2].
I remember trying this back in the day. It was a lot of fun. I remember being surprised that it worked so well. Back then not everything on sourceforge worked...
This is similar to Microsoft's work in 2007: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seadragon_Software ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKwTurQgiak