Moving sand art, in your pocket instead of on the wall

A moving sand art frame is a sealed pane of glass holding colored sand, liquid, and trapped air bubbles. You flip it, the sand pours, and a new little landscape settles. Dunarium is that idea, built for your phone.

You tilt the device and real gravity does the pouring: the phone's orientation moves thousands of grains through gel and rising bubbles. Every scene is generated live as you move. You can:

• Pour and stir the sand with a finger.
• Shake the phone to churn a whole new landscape.
• Freeze gravity to hold a scene still.
• Tap Make this upright to set any resting angle as level.

It's a falling-sand toy that responds to your hand: what you see depends on how you hold it.

Physical frames work through one effect: sand of different weights, water or gel, and air bubbles that rise while the grains sift down between them, so no two scenes ever repeat.

Those frames do things an app never will. They are real objects with real weight. They hang on a wall, sit silent on a desk, need no battery, and never update. Pieces from makers like KB Collection, handcrafted in Lustenau, Austria by moving sand artist Klaus Bosch since 1988, and Exotic Sands, handmade in the USA, are the work of real craftspeople. Each one is a little different, the kind of thing you keep for years.

Dunarium runs on the same physics and fits in your pocket.

A frame is an object you keep in one spot; the app is the one you carry everywhere. Here is how the two compare:

If you want something to hold and hang, buy a frame. If you want the same slow, pouring calm on the device that's always with you, that's Dunarium.

A glass frame is sealed with a single look. In Dunarium you can change all of it:

• Swap the whole scene. 22 sand palettes, 15 glass shapes, and 25 backdrops (some animated, one using your live camera). Adjust grain size, or roll a random look.
• Hear it. A procedural ASMR soundscape (ticks, bloops, churns) is generated live as the sand moves, with a per-voice mixer for sand, bubbles, and churn. Gentle grain haptics come along too, and you can adjust them.
• Keep a moment. Record a clip with the sound baked into the video, add a caption, and end on a card that shows the look you used.
• Change the mood. Zen is slow drifting gravity; Ambient is a dim bedside scene with a clock; Sleep is a timer that fades light and sound out; Focus is a sand hourglass that ends in a soft chime. Sleep and Focus run from 30 seconds up to 12 hours.
• Turn a photo into sand with Portrait: it holds still until you tap it, then it pours.

None of that fits inside a sealed frame.

Sand frames are a classic gift: quiet, a little hypnotic, and good on a desk or a bedside table. Dunarium is the pocket-sized version of that gift.

• It is free to try, so anyone can install it and see whether they like it first.
• One optional purchase unlocks every palette, glass shape, and backdrop, a small extra to give.
• No account and no ads, so there is nothing to set up.

It is a toy for winding down and zoning out. If the person on your list keeps a sand frame on their desk, this is the one they can carry everywhere.

Dunarium is free to play. One optional one-time purchase, Unlock Everything (planned at $4.99 in the US), opens every palette, glass shape, and backdrop. There is no subscription.

• No ads, no account.
• Works offline after you install it.
• Your camera frames and sensor readings stay on the device.

Dunarium is available on iPhone and Android. The tagline: a relaxing falling sand toy app.