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At Golden Door, the over- 600-acre California spa favored by celebrities and CEOs, clients are buzzing about a new high-tech wellness treatment. “The Circle,” a multisensory outdoor healing experience that debuted last year, surrounds guests with a 360-degree 12-foot video screen that depicts, say, minnows swimming or cherry blossoms blooming with synchronized light effects—while serenading them with a live cellist, taiko drummer and violinist hidden in the nearby forest.
The Latest Spa Trend? ‘Immersive Digital Treatments’ Designed for Anyone With Frayed Nerves
The next wave in wellness features light shows, sound waves, virtual reality displays and other digital effects
Updated on: Jul 19, 2025, 03:45:43 IST
WSJ
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“I’ve had guests tell me this is the first time their mind just completely turned off,” said Kathy Van Ness, Golden Door’s COO.
Sound wacky? It’s just the beginning. At spas and resorts around the world, “immersive digital wellness experiences,” as they’re called, are trending. Their aim? Luring clients who struggle with dwindling attention spans and anxiety with programs that soothe and engage the senses via video streams, synchronized light, music, vibrations and even scents.
Soon after co-founding the interactive art center Meow Wolf in Santa Fe, N.M., entrepreneur Corvas Brinkerhoff began formulating his next move during a soak at his local Japanese bathhouse. While rotating through the circuit of saunas, hot tubs and cold plunges, he wondered how spas could use art to make the experiences even more blissful. Those daydreams sent Brinkerhoff diving into the field of neuroaesthetics, which examines how art and other aesthetic experiences affect the brain and create a sense of well-being.
Result: Submersive, a psychedelic warehouse-sized bathhouse that’s poised to launch next year in Austin, Texas. Part digital dreamscape, part Turkish bath, it will offer treatments accompanied by trippy digital video, lighting and sound that change in tandem with users’ biometric data like heart rate. “Each room is designed to [promote] a different state,” taking you from wonder to deep relaxation, Brinkerhoff said.
Some pros remain skeptical. “When we learn something is good for us we immediately want to do it faster and better—to take the pill or use the app,” said Lisa Levine, founder of the Brooklyn, N.Y., healing studio Maha Rose. “But it’s like putting a coat of paint on something broken. Technology may help access parts of the mind, but if the work doesn’t have a solid grounding, the rewards are going to be superficial.”
If nothing else, these high-concept “experiences” can encourage restless folks like me to linger longer. In April, I attended an Aufguss sauna “event” at Fontainebleau Las Vegas that featured aromatherapy, stadium seating and a towel-clad sauna master doing an elaborate dance set to music. The choreography—and the group setting—kept me from ducking out when the temperature started to get uncomfortable.
Similarly, the Gharieni Augmented Massage I tried on a girls’ trip to Yaamava’ Resort & Casino on the way to Palm Springs, Calif., kept my mind on the massage rather than my to-do list. The therapist’s strokes triggered sensors in the table that generated sounds of drums, whistling Himalayan bowls or rain.
Dubai’s Jumeirah Burj Al Arab’s Talise Spa calls its 25-minute Mind Spa treatment featuring beats and “3-D sound” a “brain massage.” Other spas invite peace-seekers into pods to block out the world. StringTheory11, a wellness center in Santa Rosa, Calif., features “The Harmonic Egg.” Surrounded by sound waves and colored lights, you recline in a zero-gravity chair, a set-up that promises to rehabilitate your mood.
This is a world filled with buzzwords like “vibroacoustic massage” and “spatial audio” where the troubled are promised virtual-reality journeys that lull their heart and breathing rates to dip. Of a treatment offered in Senkiva’s Vessel, a silvery space-age pod that launched at the Four Seasons Oahu in 2020 and is expanding to San Francisco early next year, Senkiva CEO Alex Theory claims, “It has a tremendous effect on physiology after just five minutes.”
The field is still a work in progress, with companies like Submersive and Senkiva putting the final touches on their platforms. But investors are betting big bucks on immersive wellness as the antidote to overstimulated lives. “We’d have a much healthier, grounded society,” said Theory, “if, rather than social-media scrolling, this is how we spent time with technology.”
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