I hadn’t seen this feature before on the SERP. This is in the results for arsenic:
You can rotate it, etc. and it is also directly linkable. As is often the case with Google SERP features, it is somewhat difficult to find when it was introduced. It could be a while ago, I’m not in the habit of searching arsenic (a search I was exploring out of interest in the recent and seemingly overblown research on tampons, not as part of some Agatha Christie plot).
The arsenic visualization seems to be related to the Signal Garden atom visualizer on Google Play. Other result have different sources and formats. The visualization for salt is a grab bag of diagrams where the interactivity is primarily labels and links. It looks like Google is mapping links to Google searches on top of the diagrams dynamically, though I can’t tell that for sure.
Right now I can only find the diagrams for atoms and molecules — if you’ve seen this panel in other searches let me know below.
Good catch, Mike. I wonder how they're developing this.