Change your emotional state with VR

Our latest Virtual Reality experience ‘Liminal Origin’ made its first appearance in the public domain at Pause Fest last week. The anticipation leading up to the event was exciting to say the least and we couldn’t be more pleased with the response.

Liminal Origin is a unique VR experience designed to induce a heightened state of energy that transitions to a deep state of calm, all within a tiny 6-minute window in a Google Daydream headset.

Drawing on a wide range of psychological principles and neuroscientific research, our research team of psychologists and VR developers have broken down the specific audio-visual components associated with calming and energising effects into a number of VR design factors. These design factors have been used by our creative team to create non-representational, engaging and emotionally charged VR experiences.

Crowds of visitors arrived at our stand throughout the day to take part and the reactions have been overwhelmingly positive. As part of the experience, users were asked to fill out a short psychometric questionnaire before and after they took part.

Emotional state of 58 users before and after Liminal Origin

We saw a significant rise from 10.3% to 32.8% in subjective feelings of calm from before and after the experience, an increase from 10.3% to 19% in feelings of relaxation, along with a reduction in feelings of tension and irritation.

For a promotional experience which was designed to be a teaser of things to come, this was an outstanding result! We never expected a three-minute calming experience, administered directly after an energising experience within a buzzing Pause Fest environment to yield such positive calming effects.  

Why VR?

When you immerse yourself within a VR headset, your visual and audio perception becomes fully absorbed in a new world. You no longer have the option to look away from the screen and pay attention to alternate pieces of information. This makes VR the perfect tool to induce an emotional state because you can maintain almost complete control over the users attentional focus.

We’re taking our research a step further with phase two of testing which will involve a series of biometric feedback assessments throughout the duration in collaboration with neuroscientists at Deakin University. On the grounds of the positive feedback we received at Pause Fest we’re extremely confident that the results will solidify the effectiveness of Liminal Origin.

If you're interested in creating emotionally engaging VR products to engage with your clients please don't hesitate to contact us.