Midnight Laundromat
An empty laundromat after midnight, one machine still going, rain on the big front window. Watch the drum turn and listen to the wash.
A turning drum
The washer’s drum turns slowly, and faster if you choose Spin, while rain runs down the window. Nothing flashes. Sound plays only if you start with it.
What you can do here
- Watch the wash
- On Wash the drum turns one way and then the other, lifting the towels up the side and letting them slide back down, the way a front-loader works through its load.
- Change the cycle
- Tap the washer door, or pick Spin or Rest. On Spin the drum keeps turning and the towels stay pressed against it; on Rest it stops, and the room goes quiet except for the rain.
- Turn the rain up or down
- Rain changes how hard it comes down: more drops on the glass, more streaks under the street lamps, more rings on the road, and louder.
- Knock on the glass
- Tap the window and the drops near your finger lose their grip and run.
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/midnight-laundromat/#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 wash goes back and forth
A front-loading washer doesn’t spin the whole time. While it washes, the drum turns slowly for a few seconds each way, so the load is lifted and dropped through the water. The fast spin comes at the end, to wring the water out. The drum here follows the same pattern.
About the sounds
Three recordings: a washer partway through its cycle, rain on glass, and the soft click of the door latch when you tap the machine. The washer sound is one steady wash; Spin and Rest change how loud it is, not what it is.
If you’d rather just watch
Picture and sounds generated from our prompts. Motion, controls and mix by WhiteScreen.tv.
