It's somehow still 2020, and while you've survived eight months of staggered isolation mandates, cabin fever doesn't begin to describe your desire for grounding.
You want a vacation to get away from the shrinking confines of your home and remote work, but countless travel and financial barriers stand between you and the retreat that you sorely deserve. Doomscrolling over a bowl of potato chips between exasperated sighs while agonizing about how there's no perceivable end to the pandemic is the new itinerary planner. Fortunately, as winter ominously looms ahead, a glimmer of repose shines from the recesses of social media: ambience rooms.
What are ambience rooms?
People across the globe are defying limits of time and space in the wading pools of virtual reality, and while it may not look like the teleportation portals of fiction, it's the mental escape that they need. The Ambience Youtube genre is home to thousands of one to 10-hour long CGI videos that are transporting users to glistening destinations and charming remote cottages all in the name of seeking release.
With consoling titles like "Campfire By The Sea" and "Victorian Era Ambience," it's easy to dive into these worlds, which combine hypnotic imagery, sound, and animation to create lingering engagements that take viewers to therapeutic virtual environments. It's a rapidly expanding niche where dedicated subscribers are cozying up to their computers to relax, sleep, or gaze as they drift into deep fantasy worlds. This year has enticed millions to find a quiet corner, pop in their earbuds, and log on to their first encounters with ambience content.
The offshoot of the already peculiar yet fascinating ASMR canon is a universe of its own. While creators of "Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response" content use distinct sounds to elicit a tingling neural sensation for listeners, ambience settings are a multisensory experience. Idyllic channel themes reflect the artist's unique design style; some may emphasize light and color in sci-fi settings, while others take a hyper-realist approach, centering original sounds in comforting everyday scenarios. Despite varying tones and creative direction, each artwork shares a common focus — to inspire mental and physical rejuvenation.
Every facet of ambience art is a sanctuary for the senses. The creative intentionality behind each video is part what makes these free-of-charge dynamic illustrations so intriguing. Ambience Youtube creators spend weeks layering magnetic intricacies into their work. It's alluring subtleties like the warm glow of embers on the hearth of a fireplace, the seamless cadence of rain trickling outside a mountain cottage window, or a bubbling melody of concoctions brewing in a vibrant witches coffee shop that convince millions of viewers to return to these videos as acts of self-care.
Who makes these videos?
Autumn, the creator of the Youtube channel Autumn Cozy, likes to build around our relationship with nature. The Canadian artist, snowboarder, and aspiring author finds inspiration in fantasy literature and the changing seasons. Her work is nostalgic and rich, tapping into "anticipatory excitement over the various holidays and seasonal changes of weather."
She cites her channel, which has a community of over 100k subscribers, as a "quiet little corner of the Internet where negativity and chaos are left at the door." Autumn has noticed a significant climb in her channel's growth since the start of the pandemic. "A lot of viewers are commenting that since working from home, these ambience rooms have come in handy to sort of snuff out background noise and distractions."
Like most ambience artists, Autumn fosters a communicative relationship with her subscribers to stay in tune with their therapeutic preferences. Her comments section is lined with stories about how the channel helps people through "chemotherapy, PTSD, anxiety, depression, loneliness, and other extremely difficult situations." She also takes a collaborative approach when producing her videos by pairing with digital artists to add sound and animation to their "surreal" visuals. Her channel is an online art community that's created an equitable ecosystem for digital artists seeking to boost their commissioned work and online presence.
For Calmed By Nature, "offering comfort and escape at a time when everyone is feeling some level of discomfort and isolation," is the core motivator behind their work. The Portland artist started the project in 2016 and became a full-time creator late last year; their channel has over 200k subscribers and 16 million views. The creative process is just as comforting for Calmed By Nature as it is for their viewers; they spend several weeks drafting a concept while pulling original paintings, animation and sounds to produce their stories.
Calmed By Nature, who describes their dedicated community as "kind people looking to support each other," finds inspiration in their comment section and has noticed that more "people are drawn to the genre because self-care and connection are so important during stressful times." They center the needs of their subscribers with a wide range of thematic narratives and storybook descriptions for "viewers with vision impairment...because it helps them visualize what they are otherwise unable to see."
Virtual reality could be the future of online living
The growing popularity of virtual and augmented reality reflects a flourishing interest in cyber wellness technology by people seeking easily accessible care and investors who view VR as a promising segment of the 5 trillion dollar wellness industry. Platforms like Calm, which provides meditative audiovisual exercises for its users, report over 40 million downloads, and the digital therapy app Talkspace has over 1.5 million clients.
Virtual reality therapy and meditation prove that unplugging isn't the only means to serenity. When it entered the art-tech space almost 70 years ago, expensive hardware made VR technology difficult to access. Now its approach can be found in apps, video games, and the ambience Youtube community; all that's needed is the internet and a device to connect.
As society becomes increasingly stressed, enlisting the computers we're already socially and professionally bound to as a source of refuge is inevitable. Autumn predicts that this shift toward hyperrealistic, multi-sensory, digital engagement is the start of an art-tech renaissance in the social distancing era. "What myself and other ambience room creators are doing now might be a stepping stone to fully immersive spaces, especially with software like Unreal Engine, making it possible to step into and explore virtual environments."
It's likely — VR has one of the greatest projections for expansion in tech, with the potential to bring immersive real-life experiences to education, engineering, travel, and tours. An experience where you no longer view renders but step into them and touch the settings around you.
The urgent call for cyber wellness and new avenues to virtual interaction isn't just setting the tone for therapy; it's the future of VR. It's a peek into the idealized high-tech meta societies we've envisioned through art, film, and media. Innovations in future-science start with human need and our ability to augment existing realities to meet them. Artists, like those creating online ecology in the ambience room community, often root ideas that draft the blueprint for the regenerative utopias of our dreams.
Kendriana is a futurist writer and artist based in the United States. Follow them on Twitter @futurefemmetext.
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