Meow Wolf co-founder Corvas Brinkerhoff is leaving the company to launch an immersive spa called Submersive in Austin, Texas.
Due to open from 2026, the 25,000-square-foot wellness space will feature immersive art, video projections, lasers and artificial intelligence (AI) technology.
Subversive is described as a new kind of bathhouse that “takes you beyond relaxation into elevated states of consciousness including awe, wonder, inspiration, transcendence, euphoria, and hyper-presence”.
The new concept is “reinventing the art of bathing” with spaces that “integrate immersive art, neuroscience and social bathing elements to deliver measurable and repeatable state changes”.
To develop the spa, Brinkerhoff travelled to bathhouses around the world, exploring how different cultures enjoy communal bathing. He found that the US has very few thermal bathing spaces compared to the Asia Pacific region and Europe.
After opening in Austin, Brinkerhoff plans to expand Submersive across the US, and then globally.
The plans are for 12 unique and immersive bathing rooms around a main gathering space. The Submersive team is currently working on an AI-powered quiz that could provide an ideal route through these rooms based on a visitor’s state of mind.
The idea came to Brinkerhoff while he was visiting a Japanese-style bathhouse in Santa Fe. “I started getting flooded with images of how immersive art and steam and saunas and cold plunges could be integrated [into a bathhouse],” he told the Fast Company.
Immersive wellness experiences
“It was a very direct experience of being really inspired.”
Brinkerhoff’s goal with Submersive is to “amass the world’s deepest understanding of how multisensory experiences affect us on a physiological level”, he added.
The first phase of the spa is set to open in 2026, with the completed destination to debut in 2028.
Immersive wellness is one of blooloop’s top trends for 2024. This week, Red Sea Global spoke about the potential use of technology and AI in the wellbeing business.
Image: Lua Brice, courtesy of Submersive
