Crystal Cavern
A clear underground pool, a cluster of pale crystals, and daylight from an opening far above. Drips ring the water; touch a crystal to light it.
A quiet cave
Drips ring the pool slowly and dust drifts in the light. A touched crystal fills with warm light over about three seconds and fades over four. Nothing flashes. Sound plays only if you start with it.
What you can do here
- Light a crystal
- Tap one of the big crystals and warm light climbs slowly from its base to its point, holds, and fades, while the crystal rings. It needs a few seconds’ rest before it rings again; Ring a crystal picks one for you.
- Touch the pool
- Tap the water and a ring spreads out, bending the crystals’ reflection and the pebbles on the bottom; drag for a line of small rings. Light thrown back off the moving water wavers on the rock beside the crystals.
- Listen to the drips
- Water drips from the roof into the same few places, each on its own slow beat, the way it does in a real cave. Drips sets how often.
- Turn up the crystal light
- Crystal light brings up the small warm crystals across the pool and their reflections, slowly.
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/crystal-cavern/#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 drips land in the same places
Water seeping through the rock gathers at the tips of the stalactites, the stone icicles on a cave roof, and falls when each drop grows heavy enough. Every tip has its own supply, so it keeps its own rhythm, steady for days, and the drops land on the same spots of the pool below. That is why a cave seems to tick in several slow, different beats at once.
How big crystals grow
Large clear quartz crystals grow from mineral-rich water held in cavities in the rock for a very long time. The slower and steadier the conditions, the larger and clearer the crystals; the giant gypsum crystals of Mexico’s Naica mine, some longer than ten meters, grew in hot water over hundreds of thousands of years.
About the sounds
Two recordings and one quiet layer: cave drips and air, a single crystal ringing when you touch one, and a faint otherworldly air that rises with the Crystal light slider.
If you’d rather just watch
Picture and sounds generated from our prompts. Motion, controls and mix by WhiteScreen.tv.
