Maru-Chari, by UZG19
A desert thatknows the hour.
A live wallpaper with a single camel in the Thar. It reads your clock and your weather and lives accordingly: foraging at dawn, folded in the shade through the noon heat, huddled against a sandstorm, asleep under the stars. A handful of flat shapes, and completely still when you are not looking.
- Android live wallpaper
- No account
- Pauses when hidden
Phases in the day
Camel behaviours
Weather states
Frames drawn while hidden
The loop
Set it once. Then forget it.
There is nothing to tend. The point is a wallpaper that has been getting on with its day whether or not you were watching.
Set it once
Pick Maru-Chari from your live wallpaper list. There is no account, no sign-in and nothing to configure: it starts reading the world immediately.
It reads the hour
Your local clock maps onto six phases, from dawn through the noon heat to night. The sky colour and the camel’s behaviour both follow.
It reads the weather
Clear, cloud, rain, storm, sand or fog. Wind bends the grass; cloud cover dims the light. Severe weather overrides the hour entirely.
It notices you
Unlock your phone and the camel looks up: once, briefly, then back to whatever it was doing. Acknowledgement, not a performance.
The day
Drive the day.
Drag the clock, pick the weather. The hour boundaries are real constants from the app, and severe weather beats the clock here exactly as it does on your phone.
08:30
Morning
Forage
Full daylight, long shadows, the most active stretch of the day.
What it does
Aware, not animated.
The difference between a looping video and this is that the camel is reacting to something real.
Six behaviours, not a loop
Forage, walk, rest in shade, sleep, huddle and a one-shot welcome glance. What the camel is doing is derived from the world, not played back on a timer.
Weather overrides the clock
A sandstorm at noon does not mean a nap in the shade. Severe weather takes priority over the hour and sends the camel into a defensive huddle, whatever the time.
Warm dawn, warm dusk
Sunrise and sunset get their own palettes rather than being interpolated out of a single day-to-night blend, so the two ends of the day do not look identical.
Wind you can see
Wind strength bends the grass and moves the camel’s tail. Cloud cover drifts and dims. The weather is in the drawing, not just in a number.
Minimal by design
A handful of flat vector shapes and one palette per hour. Depth comes from tone rather than detail, which is why it stays legible behind a home screen full of icons.
Rendered natively
The wallpaper runs on the native Rive runtime inside an Android WallpaperService, drawing straight into the wallpaper surface at full resolution.
The fine print, up front
A wallpaper should cost you nothing.
It stops when you are not looking
The render loop and the animation clock both halt the moment the wallpaper is hidden: behind an app, on the lock screen, or with the screen off. A wallpaper you cannot see should not cost you anything, and this one does not.
Try it: the scene only moves while you are looking at it. Every scene on this page follows the same rule and pauses once you scroll past.
No account, no tracking
There is nothing to sign into and no analytics. The app reads your clock and, if you allow it, a coarse weather condition for your area. That is the entire list.
Works with no connection
Weather is a nicety, not a dependency. With no network the scene falls back to clear conditions and keeps running the full day cycle from your device clock alone.
Questions
Asked, answered.
It should not. The wallpaper stops advancing and stops drawing whenever it is not visible, which on a normal phone is the overwhelming majority of the day. The scene itself is a handful of flat vector shapes rather than a video or a particle system, so each frame it does draw is cheap.
Launch
Put a desert behind your icons.
Set it this evening and the camel will already be asleep. Check again at breakfast and it will be up and foraging, because that is what the hour says it should be doing.