Chrome OS 100 brings the first look at animated screensavers for Chromebooks

The latest Dev Channel release of Chrome OS 100 offers the first look at animated screensavers for Chromebooks. My daily driver from 2018 received the update last night and today I noticed a new setting to enable the screensaver. There’s only one for now, but in the future, there could be a whole ecosystem for customized Chromebook screensavers

I found the flag for this feature at chrome://flags#ambient-mode-animation.

Here’s the description:

Launches the animated screensaver (as opposed to the existing photo slideshow) when entering ambient mode. Currently, there is only one animation theme available (feel the breeze). – Chrome OS

This animated screensaver isn’t a surprise.

Reports of it were tied to Lottie, a lightweight animation file format, about six weeks ago by Chrome Story. It’s only now, with Chrome OS 100, that I’ve been able to see the feature. After sitting in front of my Chromebook and doing nothing but staring at it for five minutes (the things I do for you guys!), here’s what I saw.

This “feel the breeze” animation is taking images from one of my Google Photos albums and cleverly creating the animation. Basically, my pictures are shown as film photos tacked up on strings and swaying in the breeze. It’s probably more of a demo animation that Google is using for now while working on this feature.

Eventually, I anticipate that Chrome OS users can use the Lottie Editor to create their own animated screensavers for Chromebooks. I haven’t tried to create my own just yet, but apparently, you can use Lottie on a range of devices to create custom animations, including Android and iOS.

I’m wondering if creators will be able to share or sell their animations to other Chromebook users. There’s already a Lottie Marketplace for this purpose, so it’s clearly possible.

It all depends on the final implementation of the animated screensavers for Chromebooks. At this early stage in Chrome OS 100, I can’t tell just yet. I can only see pictures of my dog Norm feeling the breeze.