Wildlife livestream kiosk - Window into another world

Earlier this year (2026), I was at Manatee Lagoon in West Palm Beach, Florida - it's an educational center with wildlife viewing. Inside the center, there was a TV displaying a livestream of an underwater cam.

Of course, that's not the first wildlife livestream I've come across. But it staged my mind. A while later, an idea came to me: having a small display mounted somewhere in my apartment which would have an always-on wildlife^[1] livestream displaying. It's a very passive thing, not something to be constantly watched, but something to occasionally notice.

I made^[2] a simple custom site that searches YouTube for wildlife livestreams and then displays a random one, with some basic settings such as to rotate through them at a specified interval. Code can be found here: https://github.com/briancherin/wildlife-livestream

I am using an old Amazon Fire tablet and installed the "Fully Kiosk Browser" app^[3], which lets me specify a URL (where I've deployed the webapp) and it will keep the webpage locked on the screen, always in fullscreen mode. (I guess it's better than just using a browser, so it's fullscreen all the time and keeps the display on.)

The plan is to mount the tablet somewhere on my wall. This step remains to be done.

The deployed webapp is at https://display.briancher.in/ and can be viewed anywhere.

Brief contemplation on AI-development

Having coded the website essentially fully using AI, it makes me wonder about the merit of this mini project. Well, the merit is obvious: I now have a kiosk that I like and that is tuned to my goal and is ready to be used. It just feels a little bit like cheating, compared to pre-AI days when I would have coded this up on my own. (Regardless, it's not a particularly complex webapp - fullscreen embedded youtube stream, with some basic video search, config, and video selection overlay.)

So, the more important things than the actual code here are:

1. Having the idea to create this thing in the first place
2. Having the drive to implement it
3. Actually executing it and placing this in my apartment.

Those are the valuable things, and less so the fact of writing actual code. It's a more product-oriented outlook.

Scifi connection

The project reminds me of farcaster windows from Hyperion:

“Is it true, Merin, that people in the Hegemony have their homes on a dozen worlds? One house, I mean, with windows facing out on a dozen skies?” ~Hyperion

Window into another world.