Fullscreen Silent Eye Candy

December 3, 2014 9:48 AM

What are some web sites that display engaging graphics updated at least several times per hour?

At our tech company's reception area where employees and clients often pass through or wait, we display attractive summaries of our work on a big screen. We sometimes alternate that with such displays as these:

• Norse Internet Attack Map
• Extracts from the Akamai Web load monitor
• Wind Map
• Weather maps such as extracted from weather.com
• Occasional status reports on geeky, techy, and physics-y endeavors.

We ordinarily would not just show CNN or anything else that requires audio to be intelligible. What websites would you nominate? Bonus points for sites with a technology or science focus, or sites that are friendly with Google Chrome presentation mode.

posted by gregoreo to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

I keep a smugmug account with lots of pictures in it. One of the options is to have my pictures presented as a slideshow. When you set it up right, it looks like this (but with your pictures.) That way, you could control the content. Not exactly what you asked for, but it might work as a solution.
posted by workerant at 10:08 AM on December 3, 2014

There are nature shows on Netflix that I can't remember the name of that are just video with music and could easily be streamed without sound. There was one with deserts and I think a forest one.

Edit I found them. Moving art.
posted by Crystalinne at 10:47 AM on December 3, 2014 [2 favorites]

Just found this last night, by coincidence! Electric Sheep is a software framework for creating fascinating, changing shapes, with crowdsourced submissions and voting (so "show only most popular" is possible). I installed it as my screensaver. Also available for Android and Apple.

The only disadvantage I've found so far is that you can't create multi-screen patterns - you can clone, run independent images, or leave all but one screen dark. Pooey! Still, pretty satisfying to me.
posted by IAmBroom at 12:32 PM on December 3, 2014

Best answer: Animated global map of weather and other phenomena: http://earth.nullschool.net.
posted by StrawberryPie at 3:51 PM on December 3, 2014

(Additional info about earth.nullschool: click on the word "earth" to see the options, and use your mouse/track pad to zoom in and out.)
posted by StrawberryPie at 3:53 PM on December 3, 2014

I sometimes do the same thing with a client-facing PC in my library.

calm.com is engaging in a meditative sense. Select a peaceful scene and just let it loop infinitely.

Similarly, the High Definition Earth Viewing webcam from the International Space Station, on full-screen.

I also sometimes set relevant YouTube playlists running. I work in a university's health sciences library, so I'll look for promotions of products we're trying to get students to use (e.g. Primal Pictures).
posted by paleyellowwithorange at 6:07 PM on December 3, 2014

Response by poster: Thanks, all! Especially StrawberryPie. Earth.nullschool.net pleasantly transfixed the boss as he strolled through, to the extent he called for the keyboard and explored the options. I'll keep checking back here for subsequent contributions.
posted by gregoreo at 1:29 PM on December 4, 2014