The Aquarium effect fills your screen with a living fish-tank scene: a still habitat photograph brought to life with animated fish, drifting caustic light, rising bubbles, and gentle marine snow. Run it on a spare monitor, a tablet propped on a shelf, or a lobby display to add calm, continuous motion to any space.
Before you start
- A screen you can dedicate to the display. The aquarium is designed to run unattended — a second monitor, a tablet, a TV with a browser, or a phone propped nearby all work.
- Display sleep disabled if you want it running for hours. The effect itself does not prevent your screen from sleeping. Set your operating system's display timeout to Never on whichever device will show it.
Set it up
- Open the Aquarium effect on the screen you want to use.
- Open the controls and set Scene to the habitat you want — see the options below.
- Set Time of Day to Day, Night, or leave it on Auto to follow your local clock.
- Adjust Brightness up or down to suit the room light.
- Select Go Fullscreen for a clean, edge-to-edge display with no browser chrome.
You'll know it worked when fish swim smoothly across the scene, bubbles rise from the lower corners, and fine particles drift through the water.
To exit fullscreen, press Escape or move your mouse and select Exit Fullscreen.
What each control does
| Control | Options / Range | Default | What it changes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scene | Coral Reef, Planted Forest, Driftwood Log, Rocky Grotto | Planted Forest | The habitat photo and the fish species that live in it. Each scene has its own day and night background image and matching water-light colours. |
| Time of Day | Auto (follow time), Day, Night | Auto (follow time) | Which lighting variant the scene uses. Auto checks your device clock every minute and switches at 6 AM and 6 PM. |
| Brightness | 10–100 | 80 | How bright the overall display appears. Lower it for dark rooms or evening viewing; raise it for a well-lit space. |
Scene details:
- Coral Reef — orange clownfish, blue-and-yellow tropical schooling fish over a bright reef photograph. Day lighting is clear aquamarine; night dims to deep navy.
- Planted Forest — one or two large bettas with trailing veil fins, plus a school of small neon tetras, against a planted freshwater tank. Each betta is a randomly chosen real colour variety (halfmoon red, royal blue, turquoise, mustard gas, and more).
- Driftwood Log — three groups of community fish in warm amber water, with the largest group near the bottom around the log.
- Rocky Grotto — silvery and blue-grey fish with a limestone cave backdrop. Day lighting is bright blue-white; night drops to near-black with faint blue caustics.
Common setups
- Spare monitor on a work desk, all day. Scene: Planted Forest or Coral Reef, Time of Day: Auto, Brightness 75. The Auto mode transitions the lighting naturally so you do not need to adjust it morning to evening.
- Bedroom screen at night. Scene: Rocky Grotto or Planted Forest, Time of Day: Night, Brightness 30–40. Night mode significantly dims the photo and softens the caustic light, making it sleep-friendly without the fish disappearing entirely.
- Lobby or waiting-room display. Scene: Coral Reef, Time of Day: Day, Brightness 90. The bright reef reads well from a distance and the steady motion catches attention without being distracting.
- Video call background on a monitor beside your camera. Scene: Planted Forest, Time of Day: Day, Brightness 70–80. The green-tinted water casts a soft complementary fill and the betta movement is visible but not loud on camera.
Troubleshooting
The animation looks choppy or stutters. The aquarium runs on a 2D canvas that redraws every frame. Hardware acceleration being disabled in your browser is the most common cause. Turn on hardware acceleration in your browser settings and reload the page. On a machine with a slow GPU or a very high-resolution display, reducing the browser window size before going fullscreen also helps — the canvas scales to the container, so a smaller starting window means fewer pixels to draw.
The background is a solid dark colour with no photo. The scene images have not loaded yet, or the network request failed. Wait a moment for the images to arrive — they load asynchronously and the fish animation starts immediately without waiting for them. If the photo never appears, check that you have a working network connection and reload.
The fish are there but everything looks very dark. Brightness is set low. Open the controls and raise Brightness — the default is 80 but it resets on each page load, so if you navigated away and came back it may have reset. Night mode also makes the scene substantially darker; switching Time of Day to Day will brighten it.
The Time of Day switched unexpectedly. On Auto, the effect checks your device's clock every 60 seconds and switches from day to night (or vice versa) at 6 AM and 6 PM local time. If your device's clock is wrong, or you are in a time zone near the threshold, the switch can happen sooner or later than expected. Set Time of Day to Day or Night to lock it.
The fullscreen controls disappeared. Move your mouse anywhere on the screen — controls fade after five seconds of inactivity in fullscreen, and reappear on any mouse movement. They stay visible while the settings panel is open.
The effect won't go fullscreen. Some browsers require a direct user interaction on the page before allowing the Fullscreen API. Click anywhere on the page first, then select Go Fullscreen. You can also open the effect URL with #fullscreen appended to start in fullscreen directly.
Next steps
For a warmer, flickering ambient display, try Fireplace. For flowing northern-lights colour without fish, Aurora works well on the same kinds of ambient screens.