Rain, from below

An underwater lake in the rain, for iPhone and iPad. Out now on the App Store.

You are five metres under a freshwater lake, looking up. It is raining on the surface above you. Every drop writes a ring onto the underside of the water and drags a small bubble of air down with it, and the sound you hear is those bubbles ringing.

Nothing in it is a recording or a video. The water, the light, the rain, the fish and the weather are all worked out from scratch, sixty times a second, on your own device. The audio is synthesised the same way, from the physics of a bubble in water, so no two nights sound alike.

It is built to be left running. The scene repeats itself exactly every fifteen minutes in a way you cannot see, which is what lets it draw hour ten as precisely as minute one, and it will fade itself out and stop when you have asked it to.

What it does

Runtime

Ten hours without repeating, then it fades out on its own

Light

A full day and night, with the moon in its real phase

Weather

Rain, hail, snow, wind, swell and storms that pass through

Scenes

A lake, a tropical reef, a slow river and a fifty metre pool

Sound

Synthesised hydrophone audio that keeps playing with the screen locked

Data

No account, no tracking, no analytics about you

Download on the App Store

Free, with Pro inside. Version 1.2.2 is on its way: what's new.

The studio

From Below Studios is one person in Brisbane, Australia, making quiet, procedural things that are meant to be left running rather than watched. Rain, From Below is the first of them.