Unwind
Zen Visuals
Slow, quiet, low-stimulation visuals. Nothing here flashes, autoplays loudly or asks for anything. Background-tab material.
13 sites
A global membership devoted to looking up, with a cloud of the day and a manifesto against blue-sky thinking.
- 10 min
A looping animated café with lofi streams and rain sliders, built to be left open in a corner of the screen all day.
- <1 min
- Sound on
A live tank of sea nettles drifting in blue water, which has been the internet's default calming video for years.
- 10 min
Thousands of full-screen graphics experiments, each one a few hundred lines of maths you can read and edit live.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
Symmetrical generative art that blooms under the cursor, which everybody who touches it turns into a wallpaper factory.
- 10 min
An endless procedurally generated drive through mountains and deserts, with no traffic, no timer and nothing to hit.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Scroll from the surface to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, meeting every creature at the depth it actually lives.
- 10 min
The Void
AltFType anything at all and watch it drift upward and dissolve. Nothing is stored, nothing is sent, nothing can be recovered.
- 2 min
A painting that zooms into itself forever, assembled by a dozen artists so carefully that the seams never quite show.
- 2 min
One line of maths drives a sixteen-by-sixteen grid of dots, and the gallery of what people fit into that line is humbling.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Ten minutes out of somebody else's window somewhere in the world, filmed by them and left quietly running.
- 2 min
- Sound on
Draw mirrors and walls, then let a raytracer slowly paint the light bouncing between them until the image resolves.
- 10 min
- Desktop
The sequel quilt, darker and stranger than the first, still folding into itself with no end and no explanation.
- 2 min
How we picked these
Every entry in Detour is hand-sorted rather than scraped: filed under one category, given one to three moods, and placed in a time band for how quickly it pays off. The practical facts — cost, sign-up, sound, device and whether it is safe at a desk — are recorded per site and shown on every card, so you can rule things out before you click.
Zen Visuals: questions
How many sites are in Zen Visuals?
13 sites, each hand-sorted by category, mood and how long it takes to pay off. 1 of them is an AltF original that run right here.
Which of these sites are free with no sign-up?
13 of the 13 are free and need no account. None of them are paid.
Do these sites work on a phone, and are they safe for work?
9 of 13 work on a phone; the rest are desktop only. 13 are safe for work and 11 work with the sound off.