Taking an evidence based approach to Sleep in VR

When Nick and I started Liminal in 2014, we knew that there was something very unique to the medium of virtual reality. Experiencing content from a first person perspective had a very salient effect on the user's emotional state - fun things in VR are really fun and scary things are reeealy scary. So we decided to completely pivot our lives to creating a platform to maximize these effects and proliferate emotionally moving VR content. Our broader vision has always been to create a library of experiences spanning many different emotional and cognitive states.

In 2017, after a couple of years of R&D we came to another realization… not only is it possible to create deeply emotionally moving content in VR, if you know some basic principles, achieving these effects can be a lot simpler than you might think. Liminal may have psychologists and neuroscientists but you don’t have to be one to create an experience which can significantly change a user’s emotional and cognitive state. This led us to launch our global partnership program over 5 years ago and we have been working with universities and developers from all over the world, sharing our research and mentoring hundreds of people in VR UX design ever since.

Even as far back as 2014, our goal was never to be just a meditation or hypnosis app; our ethos was always about researching what works with other mediums, what has worked in VR and what novel approaches could add value.?From the outset, we have always endeavored to take an evidence based approach to our work and testing. Ripple Effect was the first experience where we really put everything we’d learnt together to create a UX that was designed to be simple, help you still yourself and help guide your breathing to help rapidly calm you down. Ripple Effect was our first knockout success and many years later is still performing really well in Liminal’s Calm arena.

We initially launched with the Calm & Energy arenas, then expanded to add the Relief and Awe arenas (Awe is currently our most popular category). Earlier this year, we launched the Focus arena, having sponsored the PhD of Adam Barton?(one of Liminal’s researchers) through Deakin University. We have an ambitious roadmap which contemplates a much wider range of experience so it was a process deliberating which category to launch next, but with 1 in 3 US adults not getting enough sleep, we felt that adding a dedicated Sleep Arena to Liminal could add a lot of value for our users.

Having researched potential applications of VR for sleep for almost 9 years now, we knew from the outset that there are some obvious considerations with using VR to help people get to sleep. Firstly, we didn’t want to blast people with blue light emitted from the VR headset which is widely known to disrupt a person’s sleep-wake cycle (perhaps having a negative effect on sleep). Therefore, it was essential to minimize blue light exposure to the extent possible. The second is that the idea of falling asleep with a headset on is rightfully a bit silly (uncomfortable and not very practical) - the Sleep Arena on Liminal is really a ‘Sleep preparation arena’, rather than something you fall asleep to.

The blue light question was the most difficult one. How do we occupy over 30% of the brain that processes visual signals to gently guide people to sleep without counterproductively blasting people with blue light? As always, we took an evidence based and R&D approach to this question. In 2021 we released a new type of experience in the Liminal Calm arena, Unseen. It is an eyes-closed experience where the user is listening to music while a colorful, aurora-like light show comes through their closed eyelids. To our surprise (and delight), Unseen proved to be very popular - it is currently ranked number 4 (out of 43 experiences) in Calm when sorted by ‘relaxation’. With many thousand psychometric data points driving our approach we had our answer. This also fits perfectly with the science, with some studies showing a reduction of over 99% of blue light being filtered through the skin, muscle and melanin in human eyelids.

Last week, we launched our Sleep arena with 4 experiences. 3 of these experiences rely on the user keeping their eyes-closed. A fourth experience (Cozy Cabin) was a variation of the current number 1 relaxing experience in the Calm arena which takes a more conventional approach with users keeping their eyes open. With hundreds of data points coming in over the weekend the initial ranking has resoundingly confirmed our approach, the top 2 experiences in Sleep are currently eyes-closed experiences with the third and fourth neck and neck between Cozy Cabin and Sanctuary (an eyes-closed experience developed by one of Liminal partners).

We will continue iterating and using an evidence and data based approach to designing Liminal experiences. This will include a mix of conventional VR sleep experiences (for those more tolerant to blue light or who have a preference for them) and eyes-closed experiences to capture the visual cortex with minimal blue light exposure to help guide people to sleep. Just looking at the data and what is possible with existing hardware, it is obvious to us that there is enormous room for innovation in this space and we are extremely proud to be the first studio to launch an experience that users can enjoy before bed while resting their eyes.

We’re super excited to be working with our partners all around the world and will continue to share our research and make the psychometric data for each experience on Liminal transparently available so the Liminal community can make evidence based decisions as well as give their own frank feedback.

If you haven’t used the Sleep arena on Liminal it is available for free on the Meta Quest 2 & Meta Quest Pro - give it a shot and let us know what you think!