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Aurora

Northern lights over dark mountains and a still lake. Three ribbons each carry a bright, sharp lower hem and rays that fade upward; the hem snakes on two slow waves plus noise so it folds into S-bends, and the rays lean with its slope, as real curtains do. The lake mirrors the sky and the peaks through slow ripples. It is an impression of an aurora, not a forecast of one — it shows no data.

Live demo →SetupPut it on a screen
Aurora in green: a near-black sky with green rays rising from two bright, wavering hems, dark mountain silhouettes across the lower third, and the curtains and a faint shoreline mirrored in a still lake at the bottom.
GreenThe default: green curtains over black peaks.
Aurora in violet: the same composition in blue-lilac, pale periwinkle rays with faint purple at their edges over the dark peaks, reflected in the lake below.
VioletThe same sky in a cooler, bluer palette.

One shader, three ribbons

The whole picture is a single fragment shader. Brightness surges travel along each ribbon, and the result goes through a gentle tone curve so a surge never clips. The clock starts at a seed-derived moment, so screens given the same seed open on the same sky.

If you self-host

Self-hosted, read-only container. Aurora makes no outbound request at all and shows no data — it is drawn on the GPU at 75% of the capped pixel ratio, redrawn at most 30 times a second, and meant to be forgotten rather than to spin up a fan.

What it wants

A palette — green, violet, or crimson — and how active the sky should be. Switch the lake off for mountains only.

Setup

Put Aurora 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 aurora.livingkiosk.com/setup.

ParameterDefaultMeaning
palettegreenviolet or crimson. The ribbon colours: the bright lower hem, and the colour its rays fade toward.
activity1How bright the ribbons are and how strongly they surge, 0.2–2. Clamped, not rejected.
lakeonoff gives mountains only instead of a lake that mirrors the sky.
speed1A multiplier on the clock every fold, surge and ripple runs from, 0.2–3.
dim0Neutral darkening overlay, 0–0.8 (fleet-wide convention).
seed—Pins the peaks, stars and ribbons, and the moment the sky starts at.

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