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I really like the idea of expanding "peripheral vision". I think it could solve the problem of "contextualizing where you are relative to your whole knowledge base", which helps:

• Load many notes into short-term memory, to prompt noticing new connections and inconsistencies
• Navigate by first moving to the "rough neighborhood" of the idea, in case you forgot the right search term
• Promote a vague feeling of confidence that notes are well organized

I'm envisioning a "google maps style" interface, where you navigate to a note by:

1. Zooming out until your destination note enters your periphery
2. Zooming back in to that destination note

Basically, I want something like Supreme Commander's Minimap

To enable this, I think we need to solve these problems:

Multiple hierarchies clutter a visualization

I'm ~80% sure that graphs with multiple overlapping hierarchies will always be hard to visualize in space, because tons of edges have no choice but to cross. Even 4 hops away might already be too much for non-trivial, multi-hierarchy knowledge bases.

Mind Maps and Google Maps work because they have a single hierarchy of "large piece of land" -> "small pieces of land". Zooming in traverses down leafs, and zooming out traverses up to the root. A camera is a spanning tree starting from the node that's the center of attention. The rules are simple, and you don't have overlapping hierarchies cluttering the camera in unpredictable ways.

One workaround is to focus on one hierarchy at a time. For example, if you're making decisions about company staffing, you can somehow focus on just the "org chart" spanning tree. If you're making decisions about project prioritization, you can focus on just the "project/task" spanning tree.

Visualizing one hierarchy at a time also opens up specialized tree visualizations such as Voronoi Treemaps

Distance in the visualization should match intuitive relatedness in your brain

For the navigation to be useful, ideas that feel related to another idea should be close to each other in the visualization.

Physics spring/repulsion layouts seem to work for single hierarchies, but not for complex graphs. Two ideas that seem related might end up far away in the visualization, because the layout of the dense hierarchies dilutes the layout of the smaller ones. An example would be the [[DONE]] node in Roam being a hub that forces it's children away from each other.

Some of my intuitions here are:

1. ideas with many mutual ideas are close