Koi Pond

A garden pond seen from straight above, running the whole width of your desk. The fish cruise it end to end and swim right across the gaps between your monitors. Leave it alone and it is calm. Feed them and it is not.

How it works

• Every koi is its own fish. Kohaku, Sanke, Showa, Ogon and Shusui, each with a pattern of its own, scales you can see up close, translucent fins and a body that bends as it swims.
• They act like fish. Slow cruising, gliding between tail beats, keeping a polite distance, turning away from the rocks, the occasional sudden dart.
• The water is really moving. Ripples spread, cross each other and bounce off the banks. They bend your view of the bed and of the fish, and the sunlight on the bottom shifts with them.
• The pond has a slow current. Lily pads, petals and fallen leaves ride it all the way around, one monitor to the next.

Things you can do

• Feed: click to scatter pellets. They float, the koi rush in and gulp them at the surface.
• Trail a finger: drag through the water and the fish scatter.
• Drop a pebble: one big ring, a stone sinking out of sight, and a lot of startled koi.
• Toss a petal and watch it join the current.
• Customize: how many koi, which varieties, four times of day (noon, golden hour, overcast, or moonlit with the stone lanterns lit), how many lily pads, how clear the water is, autumn leaves, and swim speed.

Every monitor

• In Chrome or Edge, open Customize and click Every monitor. The browser asks to manage windows on your displays; say yes, then click once per extra screen and once inside each new window. It is one continuous pond.
• A taller monitor gets a deeper bay of water, with the stone bank wrapped around it.
• Add #embed to the address for just the pond with no controls, handy for kiosk and web-screensaver setups.