Some websites are incredibly modest compared to modern websites. These are not the sites to complete your course or to do any kind of shopping or keep a streak alive. They just require some action from you, move something, listen for some time, look out the window, or watch a city pass by.
This simplicity is one of the main reasons why relaxing websites are worth visiting. They allow you to enjoy the browser as a tool for fun, not for work. Some of them offer activities; others require you to do nothing at all.
The most fascinating thing here is how differently these websites use this concept. Some keep your hands busy, while others rarely require touching the screen.
Thisissand Offers You Simple Picture-Making
The empty screen may sometimes cause some tension. Ask someone to draw on an empty canvas and suddenly you will face the problem of what to draw there.
Thisissand deals with this problem by giving you some sand.
This website was first introduced in 2008 and then turned into an application. Its core concept has not changed since that time: you are creating pictures by letting colorful digital sand fall and stack up in layers.
What makes the idea fascinating is that you do not need to decide whether you are drawing or simply playing with colors.
You can try to draw something. You can create huge slopes of different colors. You can just forget about making something and observe how the layers react to each other.
The latter idea is the most fascinating as you can find a balance between the interactivity and unpredictability of results.
WindowSwap Makes Ordinary Views Fascinating
The website WindowSwap starts with something so familiar that it does not seem like an internet experience at all: looking out the window.
Only it is not your window.
You are able to open windows provided by people living all around the world. At the moment, the website’s interface provides you with an invitation to open a window in some place in the world, while additional features help you to open more windows, bookmark windows or create playlists.
The temptation here is to think about the most amazing view you can possibly see. An ordinary view becomes more interesting exactly because of its ordinariness.
It may be a balcony, rooftops, streets, weather changes or just whatever people can see from their windows. You are looking at the view without being shown the things chosen for tourists to see.
This becomes an important difference.
Silk Rewards You for Random Drawing
The website Silk starts with an empty dark canvas and a cursor.
Start moving and bright patterns start developing from your actions. The symmetry can turn simple movements into something more complicated, while the different colors and the settings can change how things develop on the screen. This website was created by Yuri Vishnevsky, and the sound and music were created by Mat Jarvis.
The most amazing thing about the website is that your artistic skills are not important here.
Actually, overthinking here can spoil the experience.
Move the cursor in order to draw a curve, change its direction and go over something you have just drawn. The screen reacts so quickly that the experiment becomes the activity.
You can eventually create something worthy of being saved. Or you can clean everything in thirty seconds and start drawing from the beginning.
Both options are equally valid.
A Soft Murmur Lets You Create the Audio Background
The sound is capable of changing the room incredibly quickly, even when nothing changes in the room itself.
A Soft Murmur uses this principle by providing you with the opportunity to mix different ambient sounds instead of listening to a single audio file. Among the offered sounds you will find rain, thunder, waves, wind, fire, birds, crickets, coffee-shop sound, singing bowls, white noise, etc., with individual controllers that let you mix the sounds at different levels.
This makes the experience more interesting than just pressing a button and listening to the rain.
Maybe rain is enough for you. Maybe you want some thunder with rain. Maybe the coffee shop sound seemed great until you listened to it and changed your mind.
There is no combination that you should find.
You are creating an audio background for your activities.
Fluid Simulation Is Mainly About Observing What Happens
Some interactive websites become less interesting the moment you know how they work.
The website Fluid Simulation has almost the opposite feature.
Created by Pavel Dobryakov, it is a WebGL fluid simulation that also works in mobile browsers. On the screen, however, the technical explanation soon becomes secondary to what happens due to your movements.
Move or drag the cursor and the colors will follow it. Changing directions will give you new shapes. Stopping interactions will not mean the end of the process.
The lack of a goal is one of the features of the website.
And it is good to know it before opening the website because seeing it as a game would just confuse you by the fact that the game never starts.
The reaction itself becomes the experience.
Rainy Mood Almost Does Not Require Any Explanations
Rainy Mood has a completely different approach to interaction because no interaction is required at all.
You open the website and start listening to the rain.
The web version is available now together with other listening options and applications.
It seems almost refreshing how quickly the relationship between the website and visitor becomes clear. You wanted to listen to the rain. Here you have the rain.
No character needs to be created, no preferences need to be answered before starting something. There is no need to figure out the interface.
Rainy Mood becomes a reminder that relaxing websites become better not by offering you more to control.
Sometimes the lack of control is one of the most fascinating features.
Drive & Listen Turns Journey into the Destination
Drive & Listen is the website for the moments when doing nothing becomes too boring.
The website combines recorded drives through cities with local radio and allows you to choose more than 100 cities in the world. The drive footage is recorded, although the local radio streams can be live.
The result is something between travel and television.
There is no itinerary. Nobody explains the buildings you see. You do not need to arrive anywhere.
You can choose Tokyo because you always wanted to visit it, Istanbul because you recognized it, or just another city for the sake of curiosity. And you are just watching the road continue.
The website turns the time of the journey into the journey itself.
Relaxing Websites Work Better Leaving You the Room
These websites have nothing similar visually. One gives you sand, another one gives you sound, the third one opens someone’s window, and the fourth one puts you inside the moving view of a distant city.
The thing that connects them is the amount of room left for the visitor.
There is rarely some pressure to do things right. You can spend twenty minutes creating digital artwork or you can close it after two. You can interact constantly or do nothing at all.
It is exactly this that makes relaxing websites some of the most varied websites on the internet. Relaxation on the internet does not have to be just watching an empty screen. You can be curious, active, creative or just watch something ordinary happening somewhere else.
The browser does not always have to lead somewhere important.
Once in a while, it can just become an interesting place to stay.
