We built this library to take people to places they wanted to see. What we did not predict is how many people use it at the other end of the day entirely: not to go somewhere exciting, but to stop. A beach with nobody on it. A lake with reeds moving. Ten minutes of somewhere quiet before the lights go off.
It deserves its own set of recommendations, because the experiences that work best in the evening are almost the opposite of the ones that work best at any other time, and the obvious pick is usually the wrong one.
We make travel films. We are not a health product, we make no medical or therapeutic claims of any kind, and nothing here is advice about sleep or wellbeing. This is simply what we and a lot of our viewers reach for in the evening, and why. If you have a health question, ask someone qualified to answer it.
Still beats spectacular
The instinct is to pick the biggest thing in the library: the summit, the glacier, the drop. In the evening that instinct is wrong. Big scenes ask you to look around, to take stock, to react. That is engagement, and engagement is not what the last hour of the day is for.
What works instead is a scene with almost nothing happening in it, filmed from one position, where the only movement is water or grass or light. Your eyes settle in one direction and stay there. There is nothing to track and nothing to decide. The whole thing works precisely because it does not need you.
Our still and calm collection is built from exactly that: every experience we have filmed from a locked camera position, nowhere to be. If you want the same idea with a shoreline, relaxing beaches narrows it to calm coast, and calm waterways does the same for rivers, lakes and lagoons.
Short beats long
The second thing that surprises people is how short the right experience is. A ten minute film is a commitment at 10pm. A two minute one is not, and two minutes of somewhere quiet does most of the work.
Quick escapes exists for this: everything in it is short enough to watch without deciding to watch it. The trick is that you can always play another. Nobody has ever regretted a two minute escape that turned into three of them, and plenty of people have avoided starting a long one because it felt like an event.
What we actually put on
Untouched sand and open ocean, and genuinely nobody in it. The one we send people to when they say they want to be left alone for a few minutes.
Drifting through reeds and lily pads on flat water. Slow movement rather than a fixed position, which some people find settles them faster than stillness does.
A green meadow with the Alps behind it and nothing asked of you. Big landscape, small demands, which is a rare combination.
Clear water winding through a valley with peaks above. Two minutes, one direction, moving water. Close to the ideal shape for this.
Lofoten from above, fjord and mountains, cold and still. Better in winter, better with the volume low.
Thirty seconds of falling water, loud and physical. Not restful in the usual sense, and included because a lot of people find steady noise easier to settle to than quiet.
A few practical things
- Sit, do not lie down. A headset in bed puts your head at an angle the shot was not filmed from, and the horizon ends up somewhere your body disagrees with. Upright in a chair works better than it sounds.
- Turn the brightness down. Most headsets sit brighter than a dark room wants. A notch or two down changes the character of an evening scene entirely.
- Turn the sound up. Location audio is quiet by nature and headset speakers are quieter than people expect. Ours is a straight location track rather than a spatial mix, so it wants a bit of level to work.
- Pick before you put it on. Browsing in a headset is the least restful part of the whole thing. Choose on your phone or laptop, then use the handoff to send it across, which is covered in VR travel on your computer.
- Do not chase quality. The player takes the best tier your connection can hold and steps down quietly rather than stalling. Leave it alone and watch the place instead of the numbers.
Why immersive rather than a screen
Because the thing you are trying to do at the end of a day is stop being in your own room, and a rectangle in the corner of your room cannot do that. In a headset the place has real depth and real width, your peripheral vision is filled by somewhere else, and the sound is coming from that somewhere rather than from a speaker. The mechanics of why that lands are in what makes VR travel feel real.
It is also worth saying that this is not an exotic use of the library. Close to half of everything we film is calm by design, tagged that way in the library and gathered into collections for it, even though it is never the half that sells a trailer.
Where to go from here
Start in the relaxing collection, which is the broadest of the calm groupings, then narrow into still and calm or beaches depending on what kind of quiet you want. More picks are in the best relaxing VR experiences and the experiences people come back to. If a filmed place is not what settles you, our guide to relaxing VR apps compares the six kinds and says plainly what the other five do better than we do.
If you are reading this on behalf of a care setting, a facility or a research group rather than for yourself, the wellness page is the right starting point and lists how to reach us.
And if you have not got it playing yet, watching VR in a browser covers every headset, with walkthroughs for Meta Quest and PICO.