What the lava lamp screensaver is
The blobs are metaballs — a technique from early computer graphics where nothing is drawn as a shape at all. Each blob defines a field that gets weaker with the square of the distance from its centre. Every point on the screen adds up the fields from all of the blobs, and wherever that total crosses a threshold, that is the surface.
That single rule is why they behave like liquid. As two blobs approach, the fields between them add together and cross the threshold before the blobs touch, so a neck forms and pulls them into one shape. Nothing anywhere in the code knows what merging is; it falls out of the addition.
- A slow, warm background for a room, a shop or a waiting screen
- Ambient visuals for music that should not have to compete
- A lava lamp for a desk that has no room for a lava lamp
Metaballs as a lava lamp screensaver
Blobs sets how many are in the lamp. Two or three gives you long, slow encounters where each merge is an event; the default of six keeps something happening at all times, and nine turns the screen into a single churning mass. Each one rises and falls at its own rate and sways sideways on its own cycle, so they never fall into step.
The colour control sets the blobs themselves and the whole palette is rebuilt around it, including the darker background and the bright core, so any colour looks deliberate rather than tinted.
How to run the lava lamp screensaver full screen
Press the fullscreen button on the player, or the F key. Escape brings you back to the page. On a desktop browser F11 does the same job and hides the browser’s own toolbars as well, which is what you want on a display that is going to be left running.
Everything you change in the settings is written into the address bar as you change it, so the version you have set up is a link. Bookmark it, or send it to whoever is running the screen. Space pauses and resumes at any time.