Orientation in Nebula: enter, diverge and return without building a minimap

A list grants orientation for free: up is up and the previous item remains a few millimetres away. Three-dimensional space charges for every movement. A visitor must recognise a destination, choose whether to cross it and retain some evidence of where they came from. If one operation fails, depth stops explaining relations and starts manufacturing involuntary tourism.

Photosynthesis may solve the geometry and remain confusing. A beautiful chloroplast says another scale exists; it does not explain why entering matters or what happens to the current context. Navigation therefore becomes content: focus, distance, direction and causal relation must declare something before the camera begins charging kilometres.

A graph may state that A belongs to B while allowing a visitor to reach A from C through a lateral link. If Back always obeys the canonical parent, the interface returns to a taxonomic truth and betrays the journey that just occurred. The visitor arrived from C; the system delivers B with the confidence of an official who consulted the wrong form.

Nebula keeps navigation history separate from hierarchy. The return trail points to the previous place in the visit while the model preserves its structural relations. The distinction becomes essential when branches, scales and causal routes appear. Ontology organises the corpus; history organises the person crossing it.

In a scene with nearby thresholds, collision should not equal choice. The camera may brush a portal while the visitor turns, reads or remembers which key controls drift. Early tests converted proximity into accidental travel. The system had initiative; unfortunately it exercised it against its operator.

Entry now requires two signals: the threshold must be focused and the visitor must keep thrusting while crossing it. Looking selects; sustained THRUST confirms. A forgiving lock absorbs some mouse or finger tremor without choosing the destination in advance.

The interface could show name, type, scale, relations, instructions and path at all times. It could also staple a spreadsheet to the windscreen. Nebula grades information by distance, focus and mode. Territories and routes dominate at broad scale; entities and connections appear on approach; during a causal journey, the next station outranks neighbours that merely happen to be nearby.

Labels retreat before invading the camera and initial instructions leave after they become unnecessary. Mobile controls gain surface while textual inventory loses volume. The aim is not elegant concealment but attention reserved for the immediate decision.

Nebula permits local disorientation because a spatial relation may need discovery. That does not authorise infinite fog. After a few minutes, a visit should be able to answer where it began, which decision opened the current scale and how to return without resetting. If Escape is the only reliable strategy, the exit works and the laboratory fails.

Future evaluation will measure concrete tasks: find an entity, reconstruct a causal route, take a lateral detour and return to the previous point. It must also compare time and errors with a conventional representation. Beauty may attract a first visit; orientation decides whether the space can teach.