How Submersive Is Rewriting The Future Of ‘Immersive Wellness'
Submersive is the world's first immersive art bathhouse—a new kind of wellness space that blends immersive art, science, and traditional bathing practices to support healing and transformation. Founded by one of Meow Wolf's co-founders, Corvas Brinkerhoff, it's designed to awaken the senses and expand states of consciousness through environments that combine light, sound, temperature, architecture, and water. With its first location set to open in Austin, Texas in 2026, Submersive introduces what Brinkerhoff describes as immersive wellness: experiences that are not only beautiful, but measurably beneficial to our well-being.
Corvas Brinkerhoff's journey from co-founding the immersive art juggernaut Meow Wolf to launching Submersive was anything but ordinary. 'Where to begin? A world bathhouse tour, heartbreak, a dream team of visionaries, getting off the rocketship, leaping into the unknown,' Brinkerhoff recalled. After fifteen groundbreaking years with Meow Wolf, Brinkerhoff began to feel something new calling him—something more intimate, purposeful, and healing.
While pushing boundaries in immersive art, he was quietly envisioning a new kind of wellness space. 'I fantasized about taking time between ventures to explore the world's great bathing cultures,' he said. That dream became real as he traveled to 16 countries and visited over 75 of the world's best spas, bathhouses, and hot springs to understand the human tradition of communal bathing. Inspired by those research trips, Brinkerhoff brought together a think tank of world changers and visionaries to help shape the vision for Submersive—among them best-selling authors, prominent neuroscientists, spa industry experts, artists, and designers. These experiences, combined with a deep personal journey, laid the foundation for Submersive.
Corvas Brinkerhoff, Founder of Submersive
'In my life I have experienced a lot of magic and wonder, but I've also been touched by addiction and depression,' Brinkerhoff shared. 'Through a lot of support I have received tremendous help and healing. Now my personal mission is to create experiences that support healing and transformation for others.' This mission, paired with his love for communal bathing, became the heartbeat of Submersive—what he calls the world's first immersive art bathhouse.
At its core, Submersive fuses cutting-edge multi-sensory design with traditional wellness practices to produce what Brinkerhoff calls 'measurable, repeatable, therapeutic benefits.' The experience combines elements like lighting, sound, video, and interactivity with saunas, cold plunges, hot baths, and steam rooms—integrating these with the latest scientific discoveries and processes. The goal is to create environments that actively elevate your state of being, using art and technology not just for stimulation, but for real, evidence-based transformation. The vision isn't just about physical relaxation—it's about holistic change on a neurological, emotional, and energetic level.
Brinkerhoff believes the future lies in what he terms Immersive Wellness. 'Immersive Wellness will far surpass existing immersive experience offerings, which tend to be based on novelty and entertainment value. That value typically wears off over time,' he explained. 'Wellness offerings have lasting value, but what's available now tends to be minimal, sterile, and clinical.'
Immersive Wellness, by contrast, offers dynamic, artful experiences designed not to distract, but to heal and elevate. 'Immersive Wellness leverages the inherent draw and dynamism of immersive experiences and deepens it with direct benefit to your well-being,' he said. 'Entertainment can give you a wonderful, albeit temporary reprieve from your day-to-day life. A wellness experience can make your life forever better. Immersive Wellness can not only capture the best of both, but unlocks new and transformational capabilities.'
The death of fellow Meow Wolf founder and close friend Matt King two years ago brought Brinkerhoff painful clarity. 'In the immense pain and loss I found clarity that it's time for me to take the leap and go create what I'm really here to create, things that have great benefit to our species and to our world,' he said. Submersive is the manifestation of that clarity—a space meant not just to awe, but to transform.
Submersive Rendering
Brinkerhoff sees Submersive as part of a larger shift toward what authors Joe Pine and James Gilmore have called the Transformation Economy—an evolution of the Experience Economy they first described 25 years ago. 'They predicted the rise of groups like Meow Wolf long before it happened,' he noted. Now, as experiential businesses move beyond offering just memorable moments, the next wave is about creating experiences that catalyze lasting personal growth and well-being. 'If Meow Wolf is the poster child for the Experience Economy, I believe Submersive will be that of the Transformation Economy,' Brinkerhoff said. In this new paradigm, businesses aren't just entertaining—they're helping people change their lives in meaningful ways.
That kind of impact, Brinkerhoff believes, requires more than inspiration—it demands a foundation in science. 'The emotion of awe, through art and music, lowers your blood pressure, makes you more open to change and connecting to others,' he explained. Heat and cold exposure provide wide-ranging benefits to the circulatory, nervous, muscular, digestive, and immune systems, while also supporting the production of mood-regulating neurotransmitters. Specific wavelengths of light can enhance cellular function and energy production. Certain sound techniques have been shown to improve cognitive performance, memory, and reaction time.
'We all have these phenomenal sensory systems that go so much further than just sight and sound,' he said. 'We have deep awareness, intelligence, and sensitivity within our bodies, facilitated by hundreds of millions of nerve endings.' That depth is often overlooked in experience design, but when engaged intentionally—especially through multi-sensory environments—it offers powerful leverage over the internal state of the individual.
'You can think of an immersive wellness experience as a giant state-change device,' Brinkerhoff said. Submersive is intentionally designed to harness those systems—using light, sound, temperature, architecture, and water—within a framework guided by the emerging field of Neuroaesthetics, which explores how multisensory environments affect us physiologically, neurologically, and behaviorally. Advisors Ivy Ross and Susan Magsamen, authors of Your Brain on Art, are helping guide Submersive's science-informed design process to ensure each experience is not only beautiful, but truly beneficial.
Submersive Rendering
Submersive's model is ambitious and research-driven. The company plans to incorporate wearables like mobile EKGs and heart rate sensors to track the real-time effects of its environments on visitors. The resulting biofeedback data will inform both audiovisual systems and future designs, effectively turning each location into a living R&D lab.
The company's first flagship location—a 25,000-square-foot indoor/outdoor facility—is set to open in Austin, Texas in 2026, featuring otherworldly baths, waterfalls, saunas, grottos, and immersive art installations.
While Meow Wolf embraces surrealist escapism, Submersive takes a more intentional, therapeutic approach. 'Our offering will be extremely novel, but our aim is to be the opposite of an escapist entertainment experience,' Brinkerhoff emphasized. Submersive uses many of the same creative tools—light, sound, architecture, and art—but applies them with a different purpose: to initiate meaningful emotional and physical shifts. Rather than offering escape, it aims to guide visitors into deeper states of awe, wonder, euphoria, transcendence, and connectedness.
As Submersive moves closer to launch, Brinkerhoff encourages others to follow the journey as the vision continues to take shape. With its ambitious blend of art, science, and wellness, Submersive isn't just introducing a new kind of space—it's helping define a new era of experiences designed to transform how we feel, connect, and heal.
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Yahoo
28-07-2025
- Yahoo
Tom Lehrer, wickedly funny musical satirist whose subversive ditties caused outrage and delight
Tom Lehrer, who has died aged 97, wrote and performed such subversive ditties as Poisoning Pigeons in the Park and The Masochism Tango, and was a sensation during the satire boom of the 1950s. A lanky figure with cropped hair, horn-rimmed glasses and a sardonic smile, Lehrer had a clear eye for phoniness and folly and a genius for subversive juxtapositions of words and ideas: 'I ache for the touch of your lips, dear,' he wrote in The Masochism Tango, 'But much more for the touch of your whips, dear./ You can raise welts/ Like nobody else/ As we dance to the Masochism Tango.' In other numbers, a trite Irish ballad celebrates a succession of murderous misdoings; a romantic love song is subverted into the lament of a lover who has murdered his girlfriend and cut off her hand as a keepsake: 'The night you died I cut it off/ I really don't know why./ For now each time I kiss it/ I get bloodstains on my tie.' 'You know,' Lehrer concluded after the end of this last piece, 'of all the songs I have ever sung, that is the one I've had the most requests not to'. 'Mr Lehrer's muse [is] not fettered by such inhibiting factors as taste,' observed The New York Times. Lehrer became a cult figure on both sides of the Atlantic for his astute parodies of composers ranging from Mozart to Gilbert and Sullivan and from Cole Porter to traditional melodies popular in what Lehrer called 'the folk song scare' of the 1950s. These became the vehicles for send-ups of boy scouts, religion, love, plagiarism and the old college tie, and dealt with such unmentionables as venereal disease, incest, pornography and drug addiction. Not everyone saw the joke. The Herald Tribune critic panned Lehrer's songs as 'more desperate than amusing' and the London Evening Standard dismissed him loftily as 'obvious, jejune, and remarkably unsophisticated'. His songs were banned by school boards in America after protests by Roman Catholic groups about The Vatican Rag ('Two four six eight./ Time to transubstantiate.'). I Wanna Go Back To Dixie was billed simply as 'a typical Dixie song, all about the many delightful features of the South', but the lyrics ('I wanna talk with Southern genn'lmen/ Put my white sheet on again/ I ain't seen a good lynching in years') so enraged students at Carolina University that they burned Lehrer in effigy. On the other hand, Fight Fiercely Harvard, a parody of the glee club songs of the time, was adopted in all seriousness by the Harvard football team and remains its theme song to this day. In all, the Lehrer canon amounted to only about 50 recorded songs and three albums. In the late 1960s, after sell-out tours of the USA and Britain he retired from performing. It was widely rumoured that the muse had deserted him when the horrors of the Vietnam War made it difficult to be funny about serious things – or as Lehrer was quoted as saying (though he later denied it): 'Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.' But he later admitted that he had been planning to retire from the outset of his career, and that the only thing that had persuaded him to defer his departure was 'the chance to visit underdeveloped countries like England'. 'I don't have to do this for a living,' he told his audiences. 'I could be earning £800 a year teaching.' Thomas Andrew Lehrer was born in New York on April 9 1928 and grew up in the cramped but intellectually stimulating world of the city's Jewish immigrant community. His father manufactured ties, but it was from his mother that he inherited his musicality and sense of humour. He would recall how, after being pestered by a dance teacher for dropping out of her class, his mother had explained with perfect deadpan that she had just had both legs amputated so she hoped the teacher would forgive her. Visits with his mother to musical theatre ignited a passion that led him as a child to insist on changing his piano teacher from a classical pianist to one who was willing to indulge his desire to play show tunes. He began writing tunes himself when he was seven or eight and was sent on summer camp with a boy called Stephen Sondheim, who became his musical hero. At the same time, Lehrer was showing a precocious talent for mathematics, and at the age of just 15, he went up to read the subject at Harvard. 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Lehrer's songs retained an enthusiastic following in the 21st century – his nuclear holocaust ditty We Will All Go Together When We Go seemed more relevant than ever – and when representatives of the rapper 2 Chainz sought permission to sample his song The Old Dope Peddler in 2012, he replied: 'As sole copyright owner of The Old Dope Peddler, I grant you mother------s permission to do this. Please give my regards to Mr. Chainz, or may I call him 2?' In 2022, uniquely for a recording artist, he announced on his website that he was relinquishing all copyright claims on his work, putting all his songs into the public domain. Tom Lehrer never married and always brushed away questions about his private life, describing himself as 'fundamentally a loner', but with a few good friends. Tom Lehrer, born April 9 1928, died July 26 2025 Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. 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CNET
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Meow Wolf's Weird Physical Universe Is Planning to Extend Into Augmented Reality
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After the beta, a public version of the overlaid AR experience could arrive at either Meow Wolf's Denver or upcoming LA locations, according to Kadlubek. Balancing virtual distractions with real experiences The blending of the virtual and the physical is a difficult territory, one promised by AR companies for years. Companies like Niantic Spatial and Snap have built tools and apps that add AR onto physical landmarks or scans of real-world mapped areas. Niantic Spatial used to have a number of AR-enabled games, but sold off most of its gaming properties to Scopely and is now focused on spatial technologies with real-world mapping. Recent projects like Peridot, a whimsical augmented reality pet that looks like it's running around your home, show off how some of the technology could work. The Meow Wolf partnership sounds almost like Pokemon Go, but it'll work both at exhibits and away from them. 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I've seen promises of these types of overlaps and connections come and go. Are they actually starting to happen? This time, however, the overlays could be coming in all sorts of ways. Meow Wolf's exhibits are going to be built for this tech integration going forward, said Lee. Existing exhibits are being retro-fitted and enhanced -- with the exception of the original, less tech-infused House of Eternal Return in Santa Fe. I already got lost in Meow Wolf's mazes of dripping art, losing myself in other worlds. The collective's weird merchandise sits on my shelves, like escaped pieces of my journey. But maybe I'll be living in Meow Wolf's world all the time in the future. Is that where all our theme parks are heading, too?
CBS News
19-05-2025
- CBS News
Grapevine Main Street Fest includes rides, food, live music, and shopping
The family-friendly Main Street Fest in the heart of historic Grapevine wraps up Sunday. It includes live music, craft beverages, shopping, and much more. The 41st annual event brings back joy to kids of all ages with dozens of rides ranging from the adventurous to traditional at the carnival and midway. The kid zone has all kinds of activities for little ones, while adults can try craft beer from across the country. Meow Wolf Grapevine has artists at the event that people can meet. Of course, with a festival comes food from funnel cakes to corn dogs, and dozens of vendors sell handcrafted items with proceeds going back into the community. "It's so great because we have a thousand volunteers who come out and help out with the festival. They're so amazing. We couldn't do it without them, and it actually benefits their civic service organizations and their nonprofits or giving back to the community at the same time," said Elizabeth Schrack, director of communications with the Grapevine Convention & Visitors Bureau. The next big event in Grapevine is the four-day Grapefest in September.
