Enchanted Workshop
A workbench at night: a little brass gear train, a leather bellows and a flask of glowing gold flecks. Pull the lever and the whole thing winds on.
Slow machinery
The gears turn slowly, the bellows rises and falls every few seconds, and gold flecks drift in the flask. Nothing flashes. Sound plays only if you start with it.
What you can do here
- Pull the lever
- Tap the ivory-tipped lever, or press Pull the lever. It swings down, springs back, and winds the gear train on by three teeth while the flask stirs. It needs a few seconds before it can be pulled again.
- Watch the gears mesh
- The three gears turn together, each the other way from the gear it meets, and each at the speed its teeth allow: the small one on the right, with the fewest teeth, turns fastest.
- Set the pace
- Pace runs the whole machine from stopped to busy: the gears, the bellows and the circling in the flask. The bellows lifts slowly to draw air and closes a little faster to push it out of its nozzle.
- Look over the brass
- Move the pointer across the mechanism and the brass edges catch a little more light, as they would under a hand-held lamp.
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/enchanted-workshop/#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 meshed gears turn at different speeds
When two gears mesh, their teeth pass each other one for one, so the gear with fewer teeth has to turn more times to keep up. The gear here with 44 teeth drives one with 39, which turns about 1.13 times for each of its turns, the other way round. Clockmakers chain gears like this to turn the steady swing of a pendulum into the slow sweep of an hour hand.
What moves the flecks in the flask
The flask glows warmest at its base. Liquid warmed there grows lighter and rises up the middle, spreads out under the surface, cools along the glass and sinks again: a slow loop called convection. The gold flecks ride it, which is why they climb in the center and drift down at the sides.
About the sounds
Two recordings and one quiet layer: the little mechanism running, the lever settling back into place, and the air of a quiet room. The mechanism gets louder with Pace and goes quiet when it stops.
If you’d rather just watch
Picture and sounds generated from our prompts. Motion, controls and mix by WhiteScreen.tv.
