Canadian FITC intro

This is the opening for the 2012 Canadian FITC festival(Future, Innovation, Technology, Creativity), a gathering of design and technology focused people that covers all creative ventures involving technology. It seems to be pretty simply made, focusing on one specific effect, but I can not figure out what in the world this is, or how it was made. Very cool. I wanted to do something similar for a title sequence in a project I'm working on, where the camera moves up a quickly-growing tree as it spins around it in 3D space, so this caught my eye as inspiration. I'm really curious as to what was done to achieve this sort of "growing rocks" effect for this one, though.