Fun
Lava lamp
Watch warm wax swell, rise, split and sink in a glowing glass lamp — or let it fill your whole screen. Pick your colours and settle in.
F full screen · Space pause (in full screen) · double-click the lamp to toggle full screen
Play and explore in your browser. No account needed.
Frequently asked questions
How does the virtual lava lamp work?
Each blob of wax has a temperature. Wax resting on the bottom of the glass is warmed by the bulb until it is hot enough to break away; hot wax is lighter than the liquid, so it rises. Everywhere in the glass the wax slowly loses heat, so it cools on the way up, turns heavier than the liquid and sinks back to be warmed again. The blobs are drawn as metaballs, a smooth field that makes nearby blobs flow together and pull apart like real melted wax.
Why do some blobs stay at the top or the bottom for a while?
Just as in a real lamp, wax on the bottom stays stuck to the pool until it is properly hot, and wax that reaches the top has to lose enough heat before it becomes heavier than the liquid. Every blob heats and cools at a slightly different rate, so they never move in step and the pattern does not repeat.
Will it slow down my phone or drain the battery?
The lamp is drawn by your graphics chip with a WebGL shader, which is light work for modern phones. The page measures its own frame rate and lowers the drawing resolution when frames run slow, so it aims to stay smooth at 60 frames per second. It stops completely while the tab is hidden. Like any animation, it does use some battery, so plug in for long sessions.
What if my browser does not support WebGL?
The lamp falls back to an ordinary 2D canvas: the same wax and lighting are calculated in JavaScript at a lower resolution and scaled up smoothly. It looks a little softer but moves the same way. The line under the controls shows which one is in use and the current frame rate.
Why does it move slowly on my device?
If your device is set to reduce motion, the lamp starts at 0.3× speed as a calmer, slower mode. You can pause it for a still picture or move the Speed slider to any value from 0.1× to 3×.
Why doesn’t it go truly full screen on my iPhone?
Safari on iPhone does not let web pages make an element full screen, so the lamp covers the whole visible page instead and the address bar may stay. Turning the phone sideways or adding the page to your Home Screen gives you more room. On iPad, Android and desktop browsers it goes truly full screen.
About this tool
This online lava lamp recreates the slow, hypnotic motion of the 1960s classic in your browser — no download and no sign-up. Everything is drawn live: there are no videos or images, so the wax never loops back to the same scene. You can show it as a lamp, with a tapered glass, a brushed-metal cap and base and a pool of coloured light on the floor, or let the wax fill the whole screen as a calm, moving background.
The motion comes from a small heat simulation. The bulb warms only the bottom of the glass, and wax sitting there stays put until it passes a temperature at which it lets go and rises. While it floats it cools slowly; once it is cooler than the liquid it sinks back to the pool. Warm wax also swells a little and fast-moving wax stretches upwards, which gives the blobs their familiar elongated shapes as they climb.
The wax is rendered as metaballs: every blob adds to a smooth field, and the surface is drawn where the field crosses a threshold, so blobs merge and split without seams. A WebGL fragment shader lights each pixel — brighter near the bulb, with a glow at the thin edges of the wax, a soft highlight on top and darker glass towards the sides — and a Canvas 2D fallback does the same maths when WebGL is not available. The page watches its own frame rate and lowers the resolution if needed to stay smooth.
Seven colour presets cover the classic combinations, and two colour pickers let you make any other. The optional ambient hum is a quiet 55 Hz tone with its octave over softly filtered noise, generated in your browser with the Web Audio API and faded in and out gently. Keep screen awake asks for a Screen Wake Lock while the lamp is full screen. Nothing is uploaded or stored — it all runs on your device.
Related tools
- All fun tools
- Virtual aquarium
- Online screensaver
- White noise generator
- Fireworks simulator
- Let it snow
- Matrix rain