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Lava

Slow, gooey blobs of colour drift and merge like the wax in an actual lava lamp — no physics engine, no metaball marching squares, just two canvases and a filter trick that turns overlapping soft-edged circles into one shape. Five palettes plus any hex pair of your own, capped at a calm 30 frames a second, with a seed that keeps two screens in step.

Live demo →SetupPut it on a screen
Lava on the classic palette: four soft-edged orange and red blobs on black, two pairs caught mid-merge into single gooey shapes.
ClassicTwo pairs mid-merge, on the default dark ground.
Lava on the purple palette: violet blobs of varying size on black, one pair merged into a single irregular gooey shape.
PurpleThe same effect, one preset over.

How the blobs merge

An SVG filter on a canvas element — blur into a colour matrix that targets alpha only — rather than a plain CSS contrast boost, which hue-shifts the seam between two differently coloured blobs. Two blobs read as one shape when close, and two shapes again when they drift apart.

Where it runs

Self-hosted, read-only container. Lava makes no outbound request at all, ever — every colour and every frame is computed in the browser.

What it wants

A palette — classic, purple, ocean, monochrome, or a custom comma-separated hex list — and a screen. Blur radius and blob scale are computed from the screen’s own shorter side, so the same URL works on a 16:9 kiosk panel or a portrait tablet.

Setup

Put Lava on a screen.

A browser is genuinely enough — Plash and Fully Kiosk below are conveniences, not requirements.

Any screen

nothing to install
  1. Open the display in whatever browser the screen already has.
  2. Go full screen: F11 on Windows and Linux, ⌃⌘F on macOS.
  3. Or give it a browser of its own, which is what a dedicated panel wants: chrome --kiosk <url> — on macOS, open -a "Google Chrome" --args --kiosk <url>.
  4. Turn off display sleep in the machine’s power settings and walk away.

Mac desktop

via Plash
  1. Install Plash from the Mac App Store — it renders any web page as your desktop wallpaper.
  2. Menu bar icon → Open URL… and paste the display’s address.
  3. Leave Browsing Mode off so clicks pass through to your desktop as normal.
  4. Plash reloads on wake, so it recovers on its own after sleep.
sindresorhus.com/plash →

Wall tablet

via Fully Kiosk
  1. On any Android tablet, install Fully Kiosk Browser.
  2. Settings → Web Content → Start URL: the display’s address.
  3. Under Device Management, keep the screen on and set a dim schedule so it isn’t glaring at 3am.
  4. Turn on Start on Boot so a power blip brings the display back by itself.
fully-kiosk.com →

Displays are ordinary web pages, so anything that can hold one open works: a Raspberry Pi on a monitor, a retired iPad, a Fire tablet, the browser built into a TV.

Configuration

URL parameters.

Everything below, plus a live preview and a URL builder that writes the link for you, is at lava.livingkiosk.com/setup.

ParameterDefaultMeaning
paletteclassicpurple, ocean, monochrome, or a custom comma-separated hex list (min. two colours).
speed1Drift-speed multiplier, 0.1–3.
blobs6How many blobs are in the lamp, 2–12.
dim0Neutral darkening overlay, 0–0.8 (fleet-wide convention).
bgdarklight or a hex colour, with or without the leading #.
seed—Pins the starting arrangement, so two screens begin the same way.

Lava is open source under the MIT licence. Run it yourself with one command — the repositories go public at launch.