Ambient works once sought to intervene in an existing environment and re-attune one’s relationship to it — they function like augmented reality. Ambience videos on YouTube (think “lo-fi hip hop radio” or ” Rainy Night Coffee Shop Ambience”) are more like virtual reality, promising an off-the-shelf escape from the environment you’re in. Ambience ceases to be something shared and becomes instead something consumed.

Ambient control will not only come from the top down, imposed by governments and large corporations on unsuspecting individuals. Much like the earlier turn to personal forms of ambient media internalized the principles of peripheral mood regulation, the “smart” automation of our shared perceptual background has a private corollary in virtual reality. While not often thought of in these terms, VR is the result of ambient intelligence put to personal use, reimagining context awareness as a way for individuals to carve out a virtual space of their own.