Think about what you like to do at home every fall or winter to get warm: crank up the thermostat, wrap yourself in a chunky blanket, and sip on hot cider in front of a blazing fireplace. In other words, when it comes to physically chasing away the cold while indulging in some comfort, you’ll want to get as cozy as possible.
However, more people are turning to the virtual world of ambient rooms on YouTube for a different kind of “warmth”—and it’s one that is more motivated by a preference for images of cozy design and soothing background sounds to match. They’re not unlike ASMR [autonomous sensory meridian response] videos, but instead of inspiring brain-tingling feelings, the soothing background noises of ambient rooms are intended as immersive experiences to be enjoyed while working or studying on the computer.
Fall- and winter-focused ambient room videos might feature remote cabin scenes with the sound of leaves or snowfall gently hitting a timber roof. There might be a pumpkin patch complete with the sound of feet crunching through leaves and woodland creatures scurrying around. Videos may also take place in a fictional—but familiar—place like the common room of Harry Potter’s Gryffindor House or even Game of Thrones settings like snowfall at Winterfell or even Littlefinger’s brothel.
ADVERTISEMENT
While ambient room videos have been around for a while, more and more people in recent years have started to rely on them for fostering comfy moods while they work. In fact, the number of ambient room fans has swelled so much on YouTube that Hulu created a series of ambient rooms inspired by Only Murders in the Building to promote the show’s second season.
Autumn McLean, creator of the YouTube channel Autumn Cozy, has been posting ambient room videos since 2018. Her highest viewed video titled “RAINY DAY COFFEESHOP AMBIENCE” has racked up more than 10 million views. She has 333k subscribers. She told The Daily Beast that this year people have been watching and engaging with her cozy fall videos sooner (starting back in July) than they did in prior years. She believes this is because many viewers are “beginning to experience summer fatigue due to the heat,” or “even the pressure we can feel to always be having fun in the sun.”
There is also a cultural element. Why viewers want cozy fall or winter scenes even earlier than usual dovetails with larger culture shifts that helped propel trends like Cottagecore. Ever since COVID lockdowns, people are embracing a certain nostalgia for prior eras. These were times that felt safe and predictable—unlike the swirling chaos that was the pandemic—and it turns out ambient room viewers are attracted to the nostalgia for very specific cozy settings and décor.
“My viewers tend to gravitate toward scenes with warm, buttery lighting, and nothing too modern-looking,” McLean said. “I believe they’re searching for a sense of nostalgia when tuning in, so they seek scenes that remind them of home, or a time and place in their past that feels familiar to them: rainy cafés, cozy reading nooks, autumn porches, bonfires by the barn.”
What About Bob?
McLean’s followers find comfort in these sorts of settings, even though they are paradoxically virtual. “Ambience rooms blend the best parts of the real world with technology,” she said, “so viewers can transport themselves to all these hundreds of different places and spaces even when they’re stuck at work or school and can’t leave their computers.”
She added, “The dichotomy of technology is that we’re using technology to escape technology.”
While these ambient rooms started becoming popular in recent years, this wasn’t always the case. In fact, there was a time when people seemed to outright reject the idea of virtual simulation of real spaces.
In 1995, there was the infamously-hated software Microsoft Bob. The program was “designed as a guide to bring most Americans who had not yet entered the digital age into the fold,” Logan Brown, a media researcher at Indiana University who focuses on the intersection of video games and culture, told The Daily Beast. “Bob presented users with a fully simulated environment. In this case: a house which contained all the tools and accouterments necessary to take care of the household affairs.”
In Microsoft Bob, users could click on the calendar on the wall to access their virtual calendar or notepad on a desk to access the virtual notepad. Users new to tech and computers could be eased into software like Word or Outlook through Microsoft Bob.
Screenshot from YouTubeIn Microsoft Bob, users could click on the calendar on the wall to access their virtual calendar or notepad on a desk to access the virtual notepad. Users new to tech and computers could be eased into software like Word or Outlook through Microsoft Bob, which offered a way for “a human user to engage with the computer in human terms: experientially, socially, and spatially,” Brown explained.
Plus, Microsoft Bob was supposed to be reassuring and cozy, Brown added. The Macintosh, released in 1984, used the “desktop” metaphor still employed today, sorting digital objects by images of files, folders, windows, and more. In doing so, Microsoft hoped to “make the computer less alien and more cozy for older users who MS worried would find them intimidating,” he added.
The design of the home itself also features all the hallmarks of middle-class coziness: a fireplace, canine companion, dark brown wood surfaces, and a lived-in look with just the right amount of clutter. After all, this was a space that Microsoft wanted people to spend as much time as possible—so why not make it cozy?
Ironically, though, no one liked Microsoft Bob’s intended comfy settings. Reviewers generally hated the software, and the product sold poorly. It garnered harsh criticism from The New York Times, which called it the work of an “esthetically challenged sixth-grader.” Similarly, The Washington Post wrote that Bob’s house was “not a place many folks would want to hang out.”
If we look back on Microsoft Bob’s virtual spaces, none of them look particularly realistic. Much of this owes to the fact that graphics at the time weren’t great. But, as Brown points out, the spaces were also sterilized of any authentic style, feeling overly manicured and boring. “Bob slavishly recreates the space of a living room, which means it also recreates the inconveniences of a living room,” he said.
Cut to 30 years later when we have YouTube ambient rooms like McLean’s that strive to create a realistic setting infused with just a touch of almost otherworldliness. Case in point: the overly “glowy amber lighting” she adds to her fall ambient room videos. While you wouldn’t typically find this type of lighting in the real world, they seem to perfectly fit in a Thomas Kincaide painting or an ambient room. “Lighting is the most important thing with ambience videos,” she explained.
Brown agrees that virtual spaces can’t be too photorealistic, or they run the risk of making viewers bored at best and at worst uncomfortable. He points out that viewers are more likely to choose a video featuring a “pleasant, semi-abstract fantasy hut vs a perfectly ‘real’ living room space” because the former is one you can’t get in real life, whereas the Microsoft Bob-like living room mimics rooms you’re probably inhabiting most of the time already.
He added, “And if you really mess it up, then you can end up with an uncanny space that’s almost perfectly photorealistic, and that’s a recipe for a downright creepy space. Not cozy!”
Artificially Ambient Intelligence
While YouTube’s fall and winter ambient rooms can teach us a lot about what we as a society and humans like about “cozy” design, it can also give us a hint about the ways that technology is encroaching into our lives. McLean says she’s noticed more and more AI-generated ambient rooms flooding YouTube in recent years. The fear then is that, if artificial intelligence is being used to create ambient rooms, these spaces may become as sterile and lifeless as those in Microsoft Bob.
“Coziness is a stridently biological concept that seems particularly ill-suited to machines,” Brown said. “Then again, people twenty years ago would have said the same thing about the synthesized cozy videos.”
McLean also worries about AI removing the artistry of ambient rooms. For her, AI offers a “watering down of art by plugging commands into a generator that then scrapes the heart and soul from artists’ work.” After all, if AI completely floods the ambient room world, they may quickly become boring and homogenized—completely removing the art that makes the process beautiful and cozy.
Perhaps that’s where the beauty of ambient rooms lies: They capture a sense of coziness, comfort, and nostalgia that no image generator or Big Tech company quite can. It’s the work done by the human artists who know what moves their viewers to stick an ambient room video on while they work, write, or study. The ones who know that coziness doesn’t come from an AI prompt or a corporate design meeting—it comes from their soul.
“Anything that inundates us too much and too fast tends to bore us,” she said. “Anything without human heart and soul also tends to leave us unmoved, and I think viewers become disenchanted when they discover something they’re watching or reading was created by a machine.”
