Leaf Pile
Free in-browser magic-mirror scene for kids — you explore it by moving in front of the camera. No install, no account.
▶ Play now — it's freeBest on a laptop or tablet with a webcam · nothing is recorded
What is Leaf Pile?
Leaves flutter down over your mirrored camera view and stack into a pile along the bottom of the frame. Move, and you kick through it the way you would kick through a real pile — leaves fly up and outward, hang, and drift back down to settle again. Most of the effort here went into the falling: every leaf swings side to side, pauses at the turn of the swing and dives across the middle of it, the way a real leaf does. No score, no timer, no way to lose. VIVID is a gustier day with more leaves.
How to explore Leaf Pile
- Press Play now and allow the camera when the browser asks. Nothing installs.
- Back off until the bottom of the picture has room in it. The pile sits along the bottom edge and never rises more than about a third of the way up the screen, so that lower band is the part you can reach into. On a laptop, push the chair back a foot or two.
- Sweep your hands, your arms or a foot down through the heap. Leaves burst away from wherever you moved, mostly straight up, and hang there before coming back down.
- Then stop. Within about a quarter of a second the blowing stops and the leaves fall normally again; a few seconds of standing still and the pile has rebuilt itself. Half of this scene is the settling.
- SPACE throws about forty leaves up at once. M turns the backing music off.
If you cannot see the room behind the leaves at all, the camera never started. The camera help page tests it in one click.
Where you stand changes what you can do
Two different things can happen to these leaves, and which you get depends on what the camera can see of you.
The first is a kick: leaves burst out of the heap exactly where you moved and go mostly straight up. The camera has to see the bottom of the picture with you in it, because that is where the pile lives. Standing back far enough that your hands reach into that lower band is the whole trick, and it is the version children ask for.
The second is a stir: any real movement anywhere in the picture lifts a few leaves, blown away from whichever side of the screen you are on. It needs no reach at all. A child framed head and shoulders over a laptop lid, who could never touch the heap, still sends leaves up whenever they move — the ones nearest their side first, and roughly one in three of the far ones too.
So a close, seated framing is not broken; it is a breeze you happen to be causing. One more difference: a leaf already in the air only gets nudged off course, while one in the pile gets properly thrown — about half as hard again.
Watch one leaf all the way down
The falling is the real subject here, not the kicking. Point a child at one leaf and follow it to the ground.
A real leaf does not drop at a steady speed. It swings sideways, almost stalls at the end of each swing where the blade lies flat against the air, then dives as it crosses the middle edge-on. These do the same, and the difference is large: the diving part is about twice the speed of the stalled part, twice on every swing.
About one leaf in five does not swing at all. Those spin instead, and they come down around a fifth faster, because a spinning leaf is edge-on half the time.
Eighteen different leaves fall: three shapes — maple, oval and oak — in six colors, from crimson and rust through amber and gold to an olive one still turning and a plain brown. Most are small, with the occasional big one. Behind them a breeze made of two slow rhythms that never quite line up wanders left and back, so no pattern repeats, and a leaf carried off one edge drifts in again at the other.
Vivid is a windier day: about 60% more leaves, falling roughly a third faster, with a sideways breeze more than twice as strong. The front page calls that button Vivid; the scene labels it GUSTY in its own corner.
What the pile does
The heap is already there when the scene opens, not a bare floor you wait to fill. After that it behaves in ways that are easy to miss:
- The ground holds only about three quarters of the leaves. The rest are always still in the air, so the sky never empties however long you leave it running, and the pile never swallows the picture.
- They do not run out. Once the heap is full it stays that size, and the leaves buried deepest make room for new arrivals.
- It stays a heap, not a skyline. No two places along the pile ever differ by more than one leaf's thickness, so a hole kicked in one spot fills in from the sides instead of leaving a canyon.
- It stops getting deeper at about a third of the screen's height.
- You can clear the lot. A second or two of genuine sweeping along the bottom empties almost all of it — then you watch it rebuild, which is the better half.
- A kicked leaf cannot land again for a third of a second, so it always visibly leaves the heap rather than snapping back into it. Settled leaves are not frozen either: the pile keeps a tiny idle movement and breathes.
SPACE lifts about forty leaves in one whoosh. It is there for the grown-up at the keyboard, when a child is watching rather than moving.
For a grown-up in the room
No end, nothing counted. Nothing is in progress that stopping would spoil, so it switches off without a negotiation.
What it sounds like. A quiet backing of soft spread chords at sixty beats a minute, no drums and no beat to speak of, plus a dry rustle each time a gust lifts leaves — capped at about three a second, so frantic movement never turns into crackling. M silences the chords and the rustle stays, which is usually what you want: the scene still answers the child with the music off. That mute is shared with the rest of the site and remembered.
On a device set to reduce motion the scene drops to about half as many leaves and a much gentler breeze on its own. Nothing here flashes at any setting.
From about three. Nothing to read, nothing to aim at, no instruction to follow and no way to be behind.
Room needed: enough to stand and swing both arms low, not enough to run. If the only spot is a desk, take the seated version — this is one of the few things here that rewards holding still, because holding still is what brings the pile back.