Harbor Cabin
The open door of a waterside cabin on a wet evening: a moored skiff, a cleat and its rope, and three lamps on the wharf across the water.
Rain on the water
Rain falls past the doorway, drops ring the water, and the skiff rises and falls a few pixels. The lamps stay steady and nothing flashes. Sound plays only if you start with it.
What you can do here
- Change the rain
- Rain goes from a drizzle to a downpour. The drops land all over the harbor, but you only see the rings up close, the way you do from a dock: far off they just roughen the water and break up the lamps’ reflections. The rain shows best where it falls through the lamplight.
- Calm or stir the harbor
- Water sets the small wind waves. Each wave travels at the speed a wave of its length really travels, so the long ones roll past slowly and the ripples hurry, and the skiff rides them a little higher.
- Take up the slack
- Tap the cleat or the rope. The line tightens, the skiff is drawn a little toward the dock, and then it eases back.
- Push the skiff
- Tap the boat and it rocks on the water, then settles.
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/harbor-cabin/#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 you only see rings up close
A raindrop makes a ring only a few inches across. From about fifteen feet away that is still a clear ring; from across the harbor it is smaller than a pixel. What the far drops do instead is roughen the surface, which is why the lamps’ reflections stretch into long, broken columns in the rain.
About the sounds
Two recordings and one shared layer: water against a wooden landing, the mooring rope settling when you tap it, and rain heard from under a roof. The rain grows with the Rain slider and the water with the Water slider. The rope waits six seconds between plays.
If you’d rather just watch
Picture and sounds generated from our prompts. Motion, controls and mix by WhiteScreen.tv.
