Virtual Aquarium
A fish tank screen for a TV, a spare monitor or the laptop nobody is using. The fish are drawn and moved by code in your browser, so they never swim the same path twice and nothing is streamed. Choose how many there are, switch the water sound on if you want it, and open it full screen.
Everything runs in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored on a server.
Stock the tank
Off until you switch it on. The sound is a low filtered noise bed that swells slowly, with short narrow bursts scattered over it for the bubbles. Your browser needs one tap before it will play any audio.
This sound is generated in your browser as it plays. It is not a recording, so nothing streams and nothing is downloaded.
Press Esc at any point to come straight back to this page.
Running it on a bigger screen
A tank earns its keep on a screen nobody is sitting in front of: a waiting room, a spare monitor at the side of the desk, the television in the corner. It is only a web page, so the routes are the ordinary ones, and whether each works depends on your hardware rather than on us.
- Plug a laptop or a phone into the HDMI port and open the page on the big screen.
- Use the browser built into the television or the streaming box, if it has one.
- Cast the tab from Chrome, and keep that tab open on the computer for as long as it plays.
What a long session costs
The fish keep moving, so no pixel is asked to hold one color, which is easier on an OLED than a still picture. It is not a fix for burn-in. A tank left running for hours every day still ages the panel the way any other bright content does.
Every fish, bubble and beam is redrawn from scratch on each frame, and the page deliberately stops the display from sleeping. Together those two flatten a battery faster than a still page does, so put a laptop or a phone on the charger before you leave the tank running.
How the tank is drawn
Nothing here is a video or a photograph. Each fish is a few shapes with its own size, color, depth and speed. It drifts towards a new height every few seconds, turns before it reaches the glass, and beats its tail faster the faster it swims, while the ones further back are drawn smaller and hazier than the ones in front. Bubbles leave the floor at random, wobble as they rise and are gone at the surface. The light is four slow beams, each drifting at its own rate, so the water never pulses as one block.
Frequently asked questions
Can I put it on a TV?
It runs anywhere a browser runs. You can open the page in a smart TV browser, cast the tab from Chrome on a computer, or plug a laptop in over HDMI. Which of those works depends on the set, and a slow TV browser may not keep up with twelve fish. Drop the count if the motion looks uneven.
Is the water sound a recording?
No, and it stays silent until you ask for it. What you hear is calculated in your browser while it plays: a low filtered noise bed that swells slowly, with short narrow bursts scattered over it for the bubbles. Nothing is downloaded and nothing streams, so it costs no data and never arrives back at the same moment twice.
Why can I only have twelve fish?
Twelve is where a tank stops reading as a tank and starts reading as a crowd. It also keeps the drawing light enough for a TV browser or an older laptop to hold a steady frame rate, which matters more than the count does.
Will it eat my data or my battery?
Data, no. After the first load there is nothing left to fetch, because the tank is code rather than video. Battery is the real cost: sixty full redraws a second, plus a display kept awake on purpose, will empty a phone or an unplugged laptop well before a static page would. Drop the fish count if you want the drawing to cost less.