Liminal VR

Big announcement from Liminal’s co-founder and CEO...

In 2014, when Nick and I were first conceptualising what a VR platform for inducing emotional and cognitive experiences might look like, Calm was the obvious place to start.

Short, enjoyable, safe VR experiences that could help people feel calmer made immediate sense.

But from the beginning, Liminal was never meant to be just a “meditation app.” Liminal was designed as a platform for exploring and shifting a wide range of human emotional and cognitive states.
Alongside Calm, we launched Energy - also positive in tone, but with a very different outcome. Calm was about settling down. Energy was about lifting up.

That was V1 of Liminal: Calm and Energy.
Keen-eyed early users may remember the grey “ghost monoliths” in the environment - a not-so-subtle hint that more emotional states were on the way. V1 first launched on Gear VR and Oculus Go in 2018.

V2 arrived in 2020, with a complete redesign of the platform UI and we expanded into Awe and Relief, opening up entirely new types of experiences. We were especially excited, and a little surprised, to see Awe become our most popular category, with some Awe experiences used hundreds of thousands of times. Relief also found its own dedicated cohort of users.

In 2023, we released Focus and Sleep.
Focus was a natural next step. One of Liminal’s researchers, Dr Adam Barton, had completed his PhD on using VR to improve people’s ability to focus, and the category has since been welcomed by schools and enterprise clients.

Sleep was another important milestone. We found that by carefully controlling brightness, colour, pacing, and even using novel closed-eye experience design, we could create VR experiences that support rest in ways that are quite different from traditional screen-based content.

But keen observers will have noticed something.

There are still ghost monoliths.

So, what comes next?

Fear.

To understand why Liminal is launching a Fear category, we need to go back to our offices on Collins Street, Melbourne, in 2017.

After years of development and rapid prototyping, we had two strong early experiences: Ripple Effect for Calm and Ion for Energy.
I wrote the initial creative concept for Ion, which included an intense red force field surrounding the user. The result was fascinating, but also a little alarming.

The first iteration of Ion increased feelings of tension from 4% before use to 26% immediately after use.

This caused a bit of panic in-house. We obviously did not want our Energy experiences making people feel tense.

But then something interesting happened.
Thirty minutes later, most of the people who had reported feeling tense no longer felt that way. Instead, many reported feeling cheerful.

Cheerfulness started at 4% before Ion, rose to 9% immediately after, and then reached 39% after half an hour, as the tense feelings subsided.

At the time, the immediate priority was triage. We had a major presentation at VRLA coming up, so we scrambled to adjust Ion and dramatically reduce the tension spike.

But that early experience taught us something important.
Emotional states are complex. VR is powerful. And when you are designing experiences that can genuinely change how people feel, safety has to come first.

That lesson shaped Liminal.

Many people do not know this, but on top of our 145+ live experiences, we have removed dozens of experiences over the years. Today, with our partners, we accept roughly one in ten submitted experiences to be featured on Liminal.

That is because Liminal has always been safety-first.

So why Fear?

Because scary things are not “default bad.”

Fear, when it is chosen, contained, playful, and clearly safe, can be thrilling. It can be energising. It can be fun. It can create relief, laughter, courage, and even cheerfulness once the moment has passed.

Most of us already understand this intuitively.

People enjoy scary movies. Children play chase games. Families tell ghost stories. Teenagers test themselves with suspense. Adults seek out rollercoasters, haunted houses, escape rooms, heights, mystery, darkness, and surprise.

The key is context.

Fear in the real world can be harmful. But fear in a safe, bounded, voluntary experience can be something very different.
This is the idea behind Liminal Fear.

We are not creating horror.

No gore.
No graphic violence.
No cruelty.
No disturbing themes of victimisation.
No realistic threat.
No axe-wielding maniacs.
No clowns with shark teeth.

Fear ≠ Horror

Some of the most frightening VR experiences people talk about are suitable for very broad audiences: walking a plank between buildings, standing near a ledge, dealing with spiders, moving through darkness, or feeling like something unseen might be nearby.

That kind of fear can be genuinely scary - very scary - without relying on content that is graphic, violent, or inappropriate.

That is the space Liminal Fear is exploring.

A safe arena for suspense, anticipation, surprise, atmosphere, imagination, courage, and release.

For schools and enterprise partners, this distinction matters.
Liminal Fear experiences are scary, but safe by design. The experiences are built around clear boundaries, careful content choices, and the same safety-first mindset that has guided Liminal from the beginning.

For our community, it means something simple:

Safe scares.
Big feelings.
A lot of fun.
And the relief that comes after.

Today, we are announcing that the Fear category is coming to Liminal this October.

It will be unlike anything we have launched before.

And we cannot wait to see what the community thinks.

Liminal Fear is coming soon https://youtu.be/TD7fnN9fyYg