Aquarium, With Refraction Screensaver
The Aquarium, With Refraction screensaver puts fish in a real volume of water, with light caustics moving across the sand below them and bubbles rising past. It runs in the browser with nothing to install; press ESC to exit.
How the Aquarium, With Refraction screensaver works
The saver renders with three.js on your GPU. The library is vendored into this site rather than fetched from a CDN, and is loaded only when a 3D screensaver actually runs.
It reads nothing external — the fish, the tank and the caustic pattern are all generated in the browser.
The scene resizes with the window and releases its WebGL context when the saver stops, so shuffle mode and Multi-view can cycle 3D savers without exhausting the browser's context limit.
If WebGL is unavailable the saver says so on screen rather than showing an empty black box.
A worked example
The sand is a single quad running a shader that layers three moving sine fields into a caustic pattern — the bright web of light that appears on the bottom of any sunlit pool. Twenty-two fish swim with independent speeds and headings, bobbing as they go, and turn back when they reach the glass. Depth fog thickens with distance, which is what makes the water feel like water.
Settings & tips
- Accent and Background recolour the scene; Speed changes the pace of both the motion and the camera.
- Add it to a Multi-view grid, though 3D savers are heavier than the 2D ones and a few per screen is plenty.
- Press ESC at any time to leave fullscreen.
Frequently asked questions
- What are caustics?
- The bright moving网 of light on the bottom of a pool. The surface acts as a lens: wherever it curves, it focuses sunlight into a line, and those lines drift as the surface moves. It is the single most recognisable thing about underwater light.
- Are the fish real species?
- No — they are simple modelled shapes in aquarium colours. This one is generative rather than data-driven.
- Does this need a special browser or plugin?
- No. It uses WebGL, which every current desktop and mobile browser supports. Nothing is installed and no plugin is required.
- Does it cost anything or need an account?
- No. Every screensaver here is free, runs in the browser and needs no sign-up.