LivingKioskUse now
← All displays

Nebula

Drifting through a cloud of glowing gas: two colours of emission, bright filaments, dark dust lanes, and stars sliding past at three depths so the drift reads as motion through space rather than a picture panning. The whole thing is one fragment shader — no textures, no offscreen passes, no assets — and it is inspired by the look of deep-sky photographs rather than modelled on any real object.

Live demo →SetupPut it on a screen
Nebula in rose: a full-screen cloud of magenta and violet gas with thin pale-pink filaments and dark purple dust lanes, scattered with small white stars at several sizes.
RoseThe default: magenta gas with pale filaments.
Nebula in teal: glowing blue-green gas with bright aqua filaments curling through it, a round black void at upper left and another dark region at right, and a field of small white stars.
TealTeal gas around a dark void.

Gas with structure

A soft glowing body comes from gently warped noise; thin bright filaments from ridged noise along the same warp; two emission colours drift through each other, and dark dust lanes eat into the glow. The view drifts and turns so slowly you only notice it after looking away.

If you self-host

Self-hosted, read-only container. Nebula makes no outbound request at all — the shader is drawn at 75% of the capped pixel ratio and only ever at a throttled 30 frames a second, whatever the display’s native refresh rate.

What it wants

A palette — rose, teal, or ember — and, if you like, how dense the gas is and how bright the stars are.

Setup

Put Nebula on a screen.

A browser is genuinely enough — the Mac app 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

LivingKiosk app
  1. Get the app and its install steps at livingkiosk.com/mac. It isn’t notarized yet, so macOS asks you to approve it once.
  2. Menu bar → Library… and pick a display for each screen.
  3. Configure… on any screen for its reload schedule, dim, and saved configs.
See the Mac app →

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 nebula.livingkiosk.com/setup.

ParameterDefaultMeaning
paletteroseteal or ember. The three emission colours: faint outer gas, main body, hot core.
density1How much gas there is, 0.3–2. Clamped, not rejected.
stars1How bright the stars are at every depth, 0–2. 0 removes them.
speed1A multiplier on the drift and the twinkle, 0.2–3. Clamped, not rejected.
dim0Neutral darkening overlay, 0–0.8 (fleet-wide convention).
seed—Pins the arrangement of the cloud and the stars, so the same URL always begins in the same place.

Nebula is open source under the MIT licence. Run it yourself with one command. The source opens to the public soon.