A kinetic sand table is a shallow dish of fine sand with a steel ball on its surface, pulled by a magnet underneath on a two-axis arm. The ball plows a trench, sand piles up along both sides, and every new pass smashes the ridges the last one left. The drawing is never finished. That is the whole appeal.
This one runs in your browser. The dish is a 90 cm table with a 2.4 cm ball. The sand is a simulated height field: the ball sinks in, displaces volume to the sides, and the piles slump to their angle of repose.
Drive gives you manual control. Follow ball watches autoplay without interrupting it. WASD or arrows to drive, or drag anywhere on the sand to pull the ball toward your finger. On a phone, drag on the sand after choosing Drive.
Design offers a curated collection of drawings. Unwind plays them on a loop with a rake between each. For a screensaver: open Ambient, press F, walk away. On a phone, add it to your home screen.
C camera · L level the bed · F fullscreen · Esc show controls. Built with Three.js. Handpan recording: Uwe Hermann, CC BY 3.0. Wood material: Dimitrios Savva & Rico Cilliers / Poly Haven, CC0. Musical drawings start from a shape and use the track’s dynamics, frequency balance and estimated rhythmic accents to reshape it. Motion slows through tight curves. When no clear pulse is found, they follow dynamics instead. Additional sound is synthesized locally. Asset credits.