Monsoon Veranda
A covered veranda with a rattan chair, a tropical garden in heavy rain, and a copper rain chain carrying the roof's water down into a stone basin.
Heavy rain
Rain falls over the garden and pours off the roof's edge, and water runs down the copper chain. The light stays the same; nothing flashes. Sound plays only if you start with it.
What you can do here
- Send water down the chain
- Touch the copper cups or the basin, or press Send water down the chain. A surge fills the top cup, spills over its rim into the next, and so on down all fourteen cups, until it lands in the basin as the recorded spill reaches its peak. Once every five seconds at most.
- Change the rain
- Rain goes from a light rain to a monsoon to a downpour: the rain over the garden gets denser, more water pours off the roof's edge, drops ring the wet steps more often, and the chain carries more water.
- Watch the roof's edge
- Water leaves the roof in strings of drops. Each drop speeds up as it falls, so its streak gets longer on the way down, the way rain off an eave does.
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/monsoon-veranda/#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.
What a rain chain is for
A rain chain, kusari-doi in Japanese, does a downspout's job in the open. Water from the gutter runs down the chain from cup to cup instead of through a pipe, so you can see it and hear it. In a light rain it threads down the middle; in a heavy one the cups overflow and it runs down the outside as well.
About the sounds
Two recordings: monsoon rain on broad leaves, and water spilling through copper cups. The rain grows louder with the Rain control. The spill's peak is lined up with the surge reaching the basin, a little over two seconds after you touch the chain.
If you’d rather just watch
Picture and sounds generated from our prompts. Motion, controls and mix by WhiteScreen.tv.
