Wheel is a mobile-first instrument for navigating large hierarchical and sequential datasets by rotating a bounded chain of nodes around an eccentric, off-screen hub. The visible portion of the chain sweeps an arc across the viewport; a fixed "magnifier" position on the arc acts as the selection lodestar. The system combines: (1) eccentric off-screen hub geometry — the rotation center lies outside the viewport, computed from viewport aspect ratio, producing a large-radius arc tuned for thumb reach on handheld devices; (2) the sprocket-chain doctrine — nodes are links in a bounded chain wrapped over an off-screen sprocket; chains have real ends, never loop, and signal their ends physically (overshoot and springback); (3) cousin chains — the chain continues across parent boundaries within a grandparent's scope, separated by typed gaps, so ordered corpora (verses, days, model years) read as one continuous ribbon; (4) a chain-relative gesture tier ladder — tap, scrub, flick, double-flick — with the flick anchored to the scrub rather than to chain length, giving identical feel on 12-node and 84,000-node chains; (5) migration flow choreography — on hierarchy transitions, fixed vessels empty and refill in place while nodes migrate between ring and pyramid in one synchronized motion; (6) a dimension/strata system — parallel navigation lenses (e.g. language, edition/translation) rendered as mirrored secondary rings on a z-axis, switchable from any node while preserving hierarchy position; and (7) gateway nodes — data-driven transit points that carry the user between heterogeneous volumes with a hub-centered cinematic wipe and a preserved return context. The instrument has been demonstrated on a marine-engine catalog (~2,000 nodes, 5 levels), the Latin Vulgate Bible (31,000+ verses), a historical calendar spanning 3000 BC to 3000 AD (chains up to ~84,000 nodes), and a music library — all running the same engine at 60fps on 2017-era phone hardware. This document is a defensive publication: it discloses these mechanisms to establish them as prior art, so that they remain free for all to use and cannot be patented. It supersedes an earlier defensive publication (November 2025) whose described mechanisms have since been retired.
Howell Gibbens (Sat,) studied this question.