More screens, less nature, and rising stress to match. Here's what the research says nature does for us — and why we spend our years recreating it.
We spend more of our days indoors, and more of our attention on a glowing rectangle, than any generation before us. Stress and anxiety have climbed right alongside. We're not going to blame your phone for everything — but it's fair to say most of us don't get nearly enough of the one thing humans spent almost all of their history surrounded by: the natural world.
Not folklore — decades of it, across environmental psychology and medicine. A few of the findings that hold up:
A few of the shapes the research keeps finding. We keep these honest — some are illustrative of the trend, not exact figures.
Here's the honest logic behind everything we build. Nature does the work — the calm, the restored attention, the settled nervous system. Most of us just can't get to it as often as we'd like. But so much of how a place reaches you is sound: rain on stone, wind in the pines, water moving somewhere out of sight, a bell across a valley. And sound we can recreate faithfully.
So that's what Wuji is. Not a screen full of nature — a place you can close your eyes and be inside. We recreate real environments as truthfully as we can, and let them play. The next best thing to being there, on the device that's already in your hand.
Nature does the work. We just bring it to you.
This isn't medicine, and we won't pretend it is. Everything above is research about nature — not a claim about our app. Wuji doesn't treat or cure anything. It's our best attempt to recreate the places that do us good, so a little of that is within reach on an ordinary afternoon.
Getting a place to feel real — not like a nice recording, but like somewhere you're standing — takes an enormous amount of care. It's most of what we do.
Wuji is coming to iPhone. Leave your email and we'll write once — when it's ready.