>Have you guys seen this before? I just saw it and thought it might provide some inspiration.
Nice. Sure procedural planet rendering is often used in scifi games. One the most beatiful implementations I've seen so far comes with "Eve-Online" (sci-fi MMO). They use a mix of procedurally and manually generated content. Take a look here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InimDSMVHiYRegarding procedurally generated landscapes I guess this 4096 bytes intro from 2009 is still "king of the hill":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YWMGuh15nE
>I wonder if JOGL could handle something like this with a similar frame rate.
Sure this can be handled easiely framerate wise by JOGL. In general if u stay under a couple of hundred api calls per frame JOGL is no different than any native C/C++ API. As nowadays everything is done using shaders staying under this "limitation" is no problem.