AWS Spatial Computing Blog

Delivering Immersive Experiences that Move the Mind: How Liminal VR Leverages Neuroscience and Psychology on AWS

Unlocking the Power of Spatial Computing Through Neuroscience and Psychology

If you search for “WOW” on the Meta Quest Store, you won’t find popular games like Gorilla Tag, Beat Saber, or Horizon Worlds at the top. Instead, you’ll come across Liminal, a platform for short, immersive virtual reality (VR) experiences meticulously designed to transform how users feel and perform.

Since launching on the Meta Store, Liminal has reached hundreds of thousands of users who have collectively experienced the platform millions of times. Whether to alleviate anxiety, improve sleep, manage pain, or enhance focus, Liminal offers a “digital cup of coffee,” or an immersive journey to evoke profound wonder. While the platform serves practical purposes, many users enjoy it purely for entertainment—the short-form content is ideal for VR, allowing people to explore various experiences without committing hours to a headset.

An image of Liminal VR logo

Liminal VR Platform

Since the founders developed the first calming experience in 2014 and publicly showcased the first energy experience in 2017, Liminal has continued to evolve. The launch of the Liminal Platform in 2018 marked a world-first introduction of “mood on demand”—a brand-new concept providing short-form content for wellbeing and entertainment, guided by Liminal’s in-house team of neuroscientists and psychologists.

Powering Liminal’s Growth and Innovation with AWS

Bootstrapping with AWS

When Liminal launched its consumer platform on the Oculus Go and Gear VR in 2018, many Extended Reality (XR) companies were busy raising funds. Liminal was, and remains to this day, a completely bootstrapped VR studio. The AWS team in Australia reached out and recommended the AWS Activate program, offering valuable cloud credits and expertise to help deploy scalable, secure cloud infrastructure.

This collaboration has allowed Liminal to build a reliable backend capable of supporting the growth of its user base while managing the computational demands of VR content. The flexibility of AWS has empowered Liminal to efficiently scale as needed, ensuring optimal performance without compromising data security.

For a bootstrapped company like Liminal, choosing AWS comes down to several key benefits that align with the need to maximize resources while maintaining agility and growth potential. Specifically:

  1. Cost-Effective Scalability: AWS provides a pay-as-you-go model, which is crucial for a bootstrapped company. Liminal can scale its infrastructure based on demand without the need for heavy upfront capital investment. This flexibility ensures that Liminal only pays for what it uses, enabling cost control during growth phases.
  2. Global Reach: AWS offers data centres worldwide, which allows Liminal to serve a global audience with low-latency experiences. This global infrastructure is critical for the seamless performance of Liminal’s VR experiences, ensuring users can access high-quality, responsive content wherever they are.
  3. Developer-Friendly Tools: AWS provides a vast array of services and developer tools, allowing Liminal to build, test, and deploy applications quickly. These tools help the team focus on developing and refining their VR experiences rather than managing infrastructure, accelerating innovation.
  4. Reliability and Security: As a wellbeing-focused platform, Liminal must ensure the security and reliability of user data. AWS offers industry-leading security features and compliance frameworks, which give Liminal the peace of mind to focus on their core mission without compromising on user trust or system stability.
  5. Innovation at Scale: AWS has a track record of supporting innovation through services like AI/ML, data analytics, and IoT, which could help Liminal incorporate cutting-edge technologies into its VR experiences as the company grows. AWS regularly updates its offerings, ensuring Liminal has access to the latest technology advancements without manual updates.

Pivoting to an Open Approach: Liminal’s Partnership Program

In 2017, Liminal took a significant step forward by announcing its developer and education partnership program at VRLA (the world’s largest virtual and augmented reality expo), sharing its research with schools and universities such as LaSalle College in Vancouver, Columbia College Chicago, and numerous institutions in Australia.

This was a major pivot for Liminal, which had previously kept its research in house:

“The decision to launch our partnership program solidified Liminal as a platform and a completely new product category in XR, led by our in-house team but significantly supported by a growing network of partners worldwide.” – Damian Moratti, Co-founder & CEO, Liminal VR.

Founders Nick Busietta and Damian Moratti have been avid VR evangelists since first trying Google Cardboard in 2014. “Scary things are really scary, fun things are really fun,” says Nick. “There’s something unique about being fully immersed in an environment, particularly for emotional induction. From the moment we experienced it, we pivoted our lives to understanding how and why VR has this transformative effect on people and how to deliver the most emotionally moving experiences possible.”

A core differentiator of Liminal’s approach is the emphasis on psychometric feedback. Each experience is evaluated based on user data, ranking them according to effectiveness and enjoyment. With millions of psychometric data points accumulated to date, Liminal uses AWS to securely manage, analyze, and refine its experiences, optimizing for emotional impact based on feedback from its community of users.

An image of Liminal VR's Desert Breeze Experience

Liminal VR Desert Breeze Experience

Tailoring VR Experiences for Specific Emotional and Cognitive States

Liminal’s Six Arenas: Calm, Energy, Relief, Awe, Focus, and Sleep

The Liminal Platform consists of six distinct categories of experiences, each designed to induce specific emotional and cognitive states. Here’s an in-depth look at each arena, including their benefits and the science behind them.

  1. Calm
    • Calm experiences aim to reduce stress and foster relaxation, providing users with peaceful environments paired with guided meditations and calming visuals.
    • The Science: Calm experiences draw on techniques such as mindfulness, slow breathing, and hypnotic induction, which are known to lower cortisol levels and activate the parasympathetic nervous system, promoting relaxation and well-being.
    • Health Benefits: Users often report significant mood improvements, with studies indicating a 32% increase in positive mood and a 22% reduction in negative emotions during pilot programs in schools and clinical settings.
  2. Energy
    • Energy experiences are designed to boost mood and invigorate, acting as a digital caffeine shot with dynamic visuals, stimulating music, and interactive challenges.
    • The Science: These experiences leverage research on arousal, linking heightened physiological activity with increased alertness and cognitive performance. Exposure to stimulating content raises heart rate and adrenaline levels, enhancing wakefulness.
    • Health Benefits: Participants consistently report elevated energy levels and heightened engagement, with a 14.7% increase in positive mood states. Energy is Liminal’s second most popular category, widely used to combat fatigue and boost motivation.
  3. Relief
    • The Relief category provides experiences tailored for alleviating physical discomfort through immersive environments and cognitive distraction techniques.
    • The Science: VR has been shown to activate alternative neural pathways that compete with pain signals, making it an effective non-pharmacological approach to pain management.
    • Health Benefits: In clinical trials, users undergoing medical procedures experienced up to a 30% reduction in pain intensity, with some studies showing lower reliance on opioid medication post-treatment. Other trials have also seen benefits for chronic pain sufferers in clinical outpatients’ settings.
  4. Awe
    • Awe experiences evoke profound feelings of wonder, transporting users to breathtaking locations or surreal landscapes, offering a sense of being part of something much larger than oneself.
    • The Science: Research indicates that awe can alter perception of time, foster prosocial behavior, and activate areas of the brain associated with the “default mode network,” which encourages creativity and expansive thinking. Awe is linked to reduced inflammation and improved psychological well-being, with studies showing that even brief awe experiences can lead to long-lasting positive mood changes.
    • Health Benefits: Awe is Liminal’s most popular category, with 75.5% of users consistently experiencing awe. It has been used in various therapeutic contexts, from palliative care to rehabilitation, to foster uplifting emotional shifts.
  5. Focus
    • Experiences in the Focus category aim to enhance concentration and mitigate mental fatigue. They include interactive meditation techniques and abstract visual environments.
    • The Science: These experiences are inspired by Attention Restoration Theory, which suggests that exposure to natural or nature-inspired environments helps restore attentional capacity by engaging the brain’s “soft fascination” mechanism.
    • Health Benefits: Users report improvements in concentration and alertness, with empirical studies showing sustained attention after just a few minutes of use. This category is particularly beneficial for educational and professional applications.
  6. Sleep
    • Liminal’s Sleep experiences aim to ease the transition into sleep through soothing environments and guided relaxation techniques.
    • The Science: By incorporating elements such as slow rhythmic breathing, calming auditory stimuli, and limiting blue light exposure, these experiences help reduce pre-sleep arousal and support the production of melatonin.
    • Health Benefits: In a sleep study which is currently ongoing, biometric data has seen participants falling asleep up to 11 minutes faster than reading a book after using a Liminal experience called Waves of Tranquility. This demonstrates significant potential to improve sleep latency and quality without the need for medication.

Securing Liminal’s Data at Scale with AWS

As Liminal’s user base and data volume continues to grow, so does the need to securely manage this information at scale. AWS provides robust infrastructure and services that allow Liminal to maintain high standards for data security and compliance.

Liminal’s tech stack is built on a foundation of robust AWS services, including:

AWS has empowered Liminal to effectively handle the computational complexities associated with their VR content, ensuring optimal performance and robust data security for their burgeoning user base. These cloud-based solutions facilitate cost-effective, secure data storage, scalable computing resources, streamlined deployment processes, and high-speed data transfer capabilities, enabling the seamless rollout of numerous immersive experiences on a grand scale.

Conclusion – The Science of WOW

The “WOW” factor in VR goes beyond the initial thrill; it is rooted in the ability to engage the brain in novel ways that traditional media cannot. Liminal’s relationship with AWS enables the platform to harness vast datasets to continuously refine and optimize each experience, adapting to user needs while maintaining the highest standards of data security.

To learn more about the Liminal solution and spatial computing on AWS please visit the following resources:

AWS Spatial Computing

AWS Spatial Computing Blogs

Liminal for school or workplace

Liminal for personal use or to download on Meta Quest