I’ve always wondered why we don’t have animated wallpapers for desktop machines. After all, if Android phones can have them, why not the big guys? There are valid, pragmatic reasons; they’re distracting, they drain system resources, and they can be hell on a laptop battery or other device that isn’t plugged in. But perfectly reasonable caveats don’t interest us, we know the risks, we want animated wallpapers, and now we can have them.

Incidentally, the idea of animating desktop elements has been around forever. Back in the early 1990s there was an add-on program for Windows 3.1 called Icon Hear-It that added animated cursors, animated icons, and additional sounds to the GUI. Of course, that early in the computer revolution, none of us realized how truly gaudy and resource-intensive all that nonsense was.

But a tasteful, animated wallpaper can make for an elegant display. I was going to talk about the way I do it on Windows 10, but I suppose I should also talk about Windows 7 and 8. Regardless of the version of Windows you are running, you’re going to need a third-party program; no OS offers animated wallpaper functionality. For the latter versions, there is a program by Stardock called DeskScapes that provides a selection of animated wallpapers, and even allows you to create your own from gifs, videos, or other animations. It’s not terribly resource dependent and ran relatively smooth on Windows 8 in a Virtual Machine.

Stardock Deskscapes

I recently learned of another program, however, called Wallpaper Engine, that is (supposedly) designed to have a very small resource footprint, and is even available through Steam for a measly $4.00 (as opposed to DeskScapes’ $9.99). Another big plus for it is that some of its wallpapers support triple-monitor setups, which I have, so I wanted to look into it further.

It has been working quite well so far. Interestingly, in my graduate design class this week we are discussing ethics, and it turns out that there are some ethically questionable ways in which this program can be used. For example: Of course the first animated wallpaper I downloaded was of zombies. But it turns out they’re not just any zombies, they’re from a video created by a company called AtmosFX (formerly Atmosfear), which creates videos to be used around Halloween by projecting them on a sheet hanging over a window or similar. They do have a lot of neat videos, I’ve considered using them myself and buying a projector just for their videos, and you may seen have seen some on display around that time of year at Spirit Halloween.

AtmosFX decorations

Apparently, AtmosFX has filed a complaint with Valve, who runs steam, and with Wallpaper Engine, stating that the background is copyrighted material and shouldn’t be downloadable for free with their program, although Wallpaper Engine didn’t provide it, only the capability to create it from existing video. Therefore, determining who is actually for the alleged copyright violation, if there is one, will be difficult. I suspect Valve will simply remove the offending wallpaper from the Wallpaper Engine workshop, however there are many, many, MANY more options for one to choose from, with the expected heavy emphasis on things like Anime and, you know, related things.

Here is a video of my three-screen setup running the zombies animated wallpaper. Also note: Not all wallpapers work across three screens, and I have had some real problems with scaling, in which Wallpaper Engine will only show the top 40 percent of the animation rather than scale it properly across screens. Single-screen setups and most dual-screen setups do not have this issue (as far as I can tell).