The Plasma desktop wallpaper system is actually a plugin-based system that can support a wide variety of different types of wallpaper. Besides the standard image, slideshow, and color wallpapers, several more interesting, dynamic, and in some cases interactive wallpapers are in the works. These include:

• pattern generator, allowing for some simple, repetitive patternss
• qedje wallpaper, which allows for some sorts of animations
• Mandelbrot wallpaper, which generates a zoomable Mandelbrot set fractal (using the mouse wheel)
• Marble desktop globe or map wallpaper, which allows you to use any installed Marble map as a background (either flat or as a globe) and allows for automatic rotation, manual rotation by dragging, and zooming with the mouse wheel
• Virus wallaper, which is apparently similar to the Game of Life although I have not tried it.

I also heard a video plugin is in the works, but it is not in the SVN directory with the others if it is being worked on right now at all. I've suggested a screensaver plugin in the past but this is apparently impossible or at least very difficult.

So does anybody have any ideas about additional wallpapers plugins that you would like to see?

A few I would like:

Kalzium: two plugins, one for showing an interactive periodic table, another for showing random molecular models at various intervals

Tessellation: which starts with a basic tesselation of some basic shape (triangle, rectangle, hexagon), and then changes lines in various ways to create a dynamically changing tessellation pattern.

Detailed weather: with 7-day forecast, hourly forecast for today, wind direction, pressure, temperature, pollen, and perhaps even an animated or static satellite view if the provider you pick supports it.

Collage: shows a collage of user-defined number of pictures randomly selected from a certain folder, or from an online picture provider like Flickr. It can be static, updated at some interval, or animated, and probably should support a few different background and picture borders. Some examples of backgrounds would be a wooden desk that you glide over, a photo development bath with water effects, or a globe that shows where the pictures came from.

Solar system: shows the real-time positions of all the planets in the solar system. Probably should support three views, scale view (although the inner planets will be barely visible), dual view (shows one scale for inner planets, another scale for outer), logarithmic scale, and fixed spacing (not to scale at all). Should be flexible enough to allow for other solar systems or planet-moon systems to be included at some point.

Kstars: shows a real-time view of the stars in the sky at your present location at the present time (or any other location and/or time). This would still work during the day, even though you can't actually see most stars during the day.

File Size: from the file size view plugin for konqueror, shows a view (without file names) of the size of all the files on your system. Can be set to update at specific intervals.

System monitor: allowing for different system status information like top, processor history, wifi strength, etc.

GPS: for GPS-enabled laptops, shows your current position. This could probably be integrated into the Marble wallpaper when GPS support is finished.

KDE-games: plays demos, computer-controlled of course, of KDE games. The user can either select an individual game or select multiple games from a list and the system than randomly picks one of those (allows users to exclude games their computer cannot handle). The games can be changed and/or reset at fixed intervals or after a random period of time.

Klotz: Shows various lego models.

Flash: allows you to use a flash animation as a walllpaper

Additional cellular automata plugins, perhaps combined with Virus into a single plugin where you can select which one you want.

More subtle animated effects, like a moving and changing gradient.

Some clones of classic screensavers, such as the Matrix, Flurry and other moving colors effects, warp star field, 4D shapes, jigglypuff/flower box, and fractal mountain generator.



Some more general "Dynamic" wallpapers that change depending on local conditions would be good. Some examples include:

Amor village: a little cartoonish town with various cartoon characters wandering about and doing various things. It has day/night and seasons, and the activities vary depending on those conditions (parties at sundown, skiing and ice skating in the winter, etc). This could be tied into the weather data engine to give the town the same weather you are having right now. Shadows should also follow the sun. Like Animal Crossing, but not interactive.

Nature scene: shows a nature scene, probably from amongst some choices, that changes depending on what time of the day it is and what season it is. So it shows the night sky at night, the day sky during the day. The sun and moon move throughout the day, with shadows moving with them. If you set your correct latitude, longitude, and direction it shows you the sun and moon in the correct spot for the time and day of the year (perhaps even including solar and lunar eclipses). If you have kstars installed it will further show the correct stars in the sky. During the summer it will be green, there will be leaves on the ground in the fall, flowers in the spring, snow in the winter. It could even be tied to the local weather, so it only shows snow when it is actually snowing and melts if it gets above freezing, leaves blow around an appropriate amount depending on how windy it is, etc. There would probably be a few different scenes, perhaps a tree-lined meadow, a forest, a beach, a farm, a city, etc. New scenes could be made by users and downloaded via Get Hot New Stuff. You could also give users the option of adding different weather indicators, like a glass thermometer, a tube that fills up with rain or snow to show how much precipitation you have gotten, bubble barometer, and/or a weather vane or weather sock to show the speed and direction of the wind.

Digital village: Similar to Amor village, except instead of showing a town that reflects outside weather, it shows a more technology-oriented town showing metaphors for what is going on inside of your computer. The number of guys running around with boxes show processor usage, the buildup of stacks of boxes show RAM usage, trains coming into and out of your computer show wired network usage, while similarly airplanes, helicopters, and/or blimps show wireless network usage. Characters start acting hot if your computer temperature gets too high. If you use kpackagekit bits of the town are remade during updates, added during installation, and removed during deinstallation. Devices that you plug in show up in some stylized way in the town, perhaps as buildings or rocket ships.


These ideas would require the desktop knowing there plasmoids are, which I am not sure is possible:

Flow plasmoid, where the desktop has a fluid flowing from one direction to another. The plasmoids would act as blocks of solid material in the fluid, and the fluid would have to flow around them and would slow down, speed up, get bunched up, create vortexes, and do other things in line with the laws of fluid dynamics. The fluid would flow in one random direction with a random speed for a while before stopping momentarily, waiting for the fluid to settle down, and then starting again in a new direction with a new speed. The fluid could be invisible with small particles, flow lines, or shadows showing where it is flowing, or be colorful.

Amor part, with lots of small creatures walking on and around the the plasmoids.

Classic games, like centipede, galaga, galaxian, frogger, pacman, and other such games with the game characters, good and bad, having to avoid the plasmoids. Alternatively, for games like missile defense the defenders and the targets could be placed randomly on the top of plasmoids, or the missiles would slowly break through the plasmoids and then be able to access the targets at the bottom of the screen. None of these would not be interactive, the games would be fully automated.


The following ideas require much more user interaction than the previous ones:

Games you can play, such as pong. Either the plasmoids or your mouse could be used as paddles (or the paddle could itself be a plasmoid), and the ball could interact with the plasmoids or ignore them. Obviously this would include pretty colors and graphical effects (probably optional).

Desktop pet, that you have to raise and feed. Probably with downloadable pets via Get Hot New Stuff.


I also have some general comments:

The plugins should also automatically reduce their frame rate and/or quality if the system load gets too high, and stop entirely if it gets even higher. The games one in particular would need this, I suspect.

It would be nice that if, when someone is writing a new piece of software for KDE, or at least a new kpart, there was an easy way to also provide a screensaver and a dynamic wallpaper based on that program.



Edits:
added nature scene idea from comments
incorporated nature scene idea from comments into amor village
incorporated flickr and globe ideas from comments into collage
added gradient idea based on comments
Added Klotz, Kstars, and easy wallpaper creation ideas.
Added digital village from comments
Added creature and pong from comments and flow around plasmoids inspired by the pong idea

I like all of your ideas.
I would again a bit selfishly abuse this post to promote a wallpaper that I made that I feel it's quite "revolutionary" even though I didn't even count on that really.
I made a Wallpaper using Inkscape and when I tried it wallpaper took on the background colours along the colours that I specified in it.
So what I basically got was an wallpaper that has a potential to use which ever colour you want.
I think that's quite cool and would like to see more of similar wallpapers.
Unfurtonally I'm not very artistic type of person (if I succeed to make something good is more of an coincidence than anything else). So if anyone thinks that it's a good thing, please make more wallpapers like that.

Screenshots:

Dynamic wallpaper: Wallpaper that changes depending on certain conditions, e.g. time of day, current weather etc. The idea isn't new - didn't Fedora have something like this?

There could be a dynamic nature wallpaper, showing the sun move throughout the day

Yeah a weather wallpaper would be cool.
And to add to Marble walpaper: a daylight indicator.
So you could see where is day and where is night.
Maybe even zoomable Marble wallpaper so it coul shown your current position and you could zoom in out and move it to somewhere else.
And if I borow a thing from Google Earth, on Google Earth there are links to Flicker photos of that area so that you would have an slideshow of wallpapers of your curent position.
that would be really cool!

Primoz wrote:And to add to Marble walpaper: a daylight indicator.
So you could see where is day and where is night.
Maybe even zoomable Marble wallpaper so it coul shown your current position and you could zoom in out and move it to somewhere else.

It already has both of these. In fact it even has weather patterns (clouds) for the daylight side (although there are some tiling problems).

Primoz wrote:And if I borow a thing from Google Earth, on Google Earth there are links to Flicker photos of that area so that you would have an slideshow of wallpapers of your curent position.
that would be really cool!

I know Digikam (or was it showphoto?) is working on something like this for personal photos. Connecting that with Flickr, and making all of that available as a wallpaper, would be great.

Suggestions have been added to the list, along with a couple of other ideas. Take a look and see if I got them right, or if you have any more ideas.

By the way, I've always wanted (kind of childhood dream actually =) something similar to "Armor village" - but instead of a town, it would show the population working inside of your computer! You know, the ones who carry around all the bits, defend your computer from viruses[1] etc.

Darwinia is pretty close to how I imagine it.

-
[1] This idea started when I saw my dad running an anti-virus program (I was still a little kid at the time and didn't know anything about operative systems or Linux). It had an icon of a small figure o|-< and an icon for viruses (looked like an evil bug), each with a number next to them. My father explained that the antivirus was fighting the viruses in the computer, and the number showed how many of each were left. Needless to say, I cheered for the antivirus.

Aaah, good old times. Now my computer doesn't even have any viruses to fight.

Nice one, I have added it.

I was thinking about a "plasma" wallpaper. There is this fabulous game called "plasma pong" where you play a pong game in an environnement filled with agitated plasma. It could be interesting to have a wallpaper based on the same principle, with obstacles or plasma generators being the plasmoids you place on the desktop. You could of course, like in the game, change the colors or the dynamic parameters or update the colors depending on that of you plasma theme.

Just an idea, but it would be pretty nice with KDE's plasma!

-Something like a pet you could raise by feeding it and/or playing with it. Or a garden with flowers that would grow if you take good care of it.

- A paint background

- Something like the PS3's background which would animate slowly.

Izfy, I do not know what the PS3 wallpaper looks like, do you have a link to a video of it?

This can probably be moved to the brainstorming thread.

Since this thread consist of several ideas, I don't think it's a good idea to move it to the brainstorm section.

How is it any different than moving the Lancelot brainstorming thread?

I think it is okay for threads like this, where the ideas are too small to warrant a completely separate thread for each idea. It might be good to have a separate category for threads like this, similar to how "Forum Announcements" and "Important Threads" are separate from the rest of the threads. That way people know they are different from the other threads. Perhaps "Compilation threads".