Autumn Rain Bay Window
A bay window with a cushioned seat, a blanket and a mug, an old cast-iron radiator under it, and a small yard of orange maples in the rain.
Rain on the glass
Drops gather and run down the panes, rain falls in the yard, and the trees move in the wind. The light stays the same; nothing flashes. Sound plays only if you start with it.
What you can do here
- Watch the drops
- Rain lands on the outside of the glass as fine beads, and a film of spray softens the view. Now and then a bigger drop gathers, sits until it is too heavy for the glass to hold, then runs down in fits and starts, sweeping up the beads in its way and leaving a clear track and a trail of smaller ones behind. Each pane is its own piece of glass, so a drop stops at the wooden bar at the bottom of its pane, where the water collects.
- Knock on the glass
- Tap a pane and the drops near where you tapped lose their grip and run, the way they do when someone raps on a wet window.
- Turn up the radiator
- Touch the radiator, or press Turn up the radiator. It ticks as the iron warms and expands, and keeps ticking now and then while it heats. After half a minute or so, warm air rising off it makes the wood and the cushion above it shimmer. It goes back down by itself after a few minutes.
- Change the weather
- Rain goes from a drizzle to a downpour: more drops on the glass, more rain falling past the trees, and a louder recording. Wind moves the maples and slants the rain, and brings down the odd leaf.
Use it as your wallpaper
Press F for fullscreen and M to turn the sound off and on; the volume and your sound choice carry over to every wallpaper. The sound keeps playing if you switch to another tab.
Live link
https://whitescreen.tv/interactive-wallpapers/autumn-rain-bay-window/#wallpaper- On a computer desktop
- Some wallpaper apps can show a web page behind your desktop icons. Give one the live link above and the scene runs there on its own: no page around it, no ads and no sound.
- On a TV or a spare screen
- Open this page and press F, or use Fullscreen. While it’s in fullscreen we ask the browser to keep the screen from going to sleep.
- On a phone or tablet
- Save image downloads exactly what’s on the screen as a picture. Set it as your wallpaper from your photos; the phone will crop the sides.
A live wallpaper keeps a page running all day. Through the live link the scene draws at most 30 frames a second and stops while the screen is covered, but on a laptop it still costs some battery.
Why the garden is upside down in every drop
A drop of water on glass is a tiny lens, rounded on the outside and flat against the pane. Like any lens it turns what is behind it upside down, so the sky shows at the bottom of each drop and the lawn at the top. The dark ring around the edge is where the drop's surface curves so steeply that the light from the garden is bent away from you, or reflected back inside the drop, instead of coming through.
Why radiators tick
Cast iron grows a little as it heats. The radiator and its pipes don't all warm at the same rate, so the joints and brackets slip against each other in small jumps, and each jump is a tick. It happens most while the radiator is warming up and again as it cools.
About the sounds
Two recordings and a quiet layer: rain on the yard and the window, a radiator settling as it warms, and the air of a quiet room. The rain gets louder and softer with the Rain control.
If you’d rather just watch
Picture and sounds generated from our prompts. Motion, controls and mix by WhiteScreen.tv.
