Firefly Grove
A forest clearing at dusk, a fern, and a scatter of fireflies. Hold still and they come to you; turn up Sync and they find one another’s rhythm.
Small blinking lights
Tiny lights drift and fade slowly on and off, one blink every few seconds. With Sync turned up they blink together. Sound plays only if you start with it.
What you can do here
- Call them over
- Hold the mouse or a finger still over the clearing and the nearest fireflies drift toward it. Sweep across quickly and they scatter, then slowly come back.
- Make them blink together
- Sync links each firefly to the others: each one nudges its own rhythm toward the crowd’s. At the top of the slider they settle into step over half a minute or so, blink together three times, and go dark together.
- More or fewer
- Fireflies runs from a handful to about ninety. The evening insects get a little louder with more of them. The few closest to you are out of focus, as they would be in a photograph.
- Touch the fern
- Tap the big fern on the left and it bends and springs back, with a soft rustle.
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/firefly-grove/#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.
Synchronous fireflies are real
In the Great Smoky Mountains one species, Photinus carolinus, gathers for about two weeks each year in late May and June and flashes in unison: a burst of quick blinks, then several seconds of dark, across a whole hillside. Some fireflies in Southeast Asia do the same in the same trees night after night. No firefly leads. Each one adjusts to the flashes it sees around it, which is what the Sync slider imitates.
About the sounds
Two recordings and one quiet layer: evening insects, a soft rustle for the fern, and a little night wind. The insects aren’t the fireflies; fireflies make no sound of their own.
If you’d rather just watch
Picture and sounds generated from our prompts. Motion, controls and mix by WhiteScreen.tv.
