Liminal Brings AI-Powered Walking Meditation to Meta Glasses

Liminal, the VR app known for short experiences designed around emotional states like calm and focus, is expanding to smartglasses with a new walking meditation experience. Liminal: Walking Meditation for Meta AI glasses uses the device's camera to capture images as you walk and provides spoken meditation guidance based on what you see in close to real time.

The required smartphone app launches in October on both iOS and Android. It costs $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year, which includes 30 contextual walks per month and unlimited access to offline scripted versions of each theme.

The app works by having users launch the smartphone companion, select a meditation theme, voice, and pacing preference, then pocket their phone. The glasses deliver the guided meditation hands-free through the device's speakers while the app uses images to describe surroundings and contextualize them for the session. Liminal co-founder and CEO Damian Moratti explained the company approached smartglasses by asking what they could actually add to the meditation experience. "Liminal has always used VR to create strong emotional responses through immersion," Moratti said. "Smartglasses gave the team a chance to apply some of that thinking while keeping people engaged with the real world as well."

At launch, the app includes twelve meditation themes. Testing revealed themes like Presence, Wonder, and Gratitude guide users differently to focus their thoughts in varying ways. Eight voice options and three pacing settings are available. Pacing does more than change silence between spoken sections. Liminal CTO Tin Nguyen explained the team uses the setting to shape how much narration users hear and the overall length of the experience. The shortest walks last around 10 to 13 minutes.

A key challenge during development was determining what deserves narration. In early testing, an early version mentioned garbage cans around eight times during a single walk. Another iteration noticed a glowing sign inside an adult store window and built an unintentionally enthusiastic narrative around it. Nguyen said the app isn't constantly shooting and analyzing images. Instead, it periodically takes a look at the current scene as the walk progresses. During testing, narration was very close to real time, with the app focusing on objects like a particular tree as users approached and passed by. The narration was separated by generous moments of silence to avoid overwhelming users.

Privacy and data retention were central to the design. Liminal says Walking Meditation uses zero data retention. When the app needs context from the environment, an image from the glasses is sent through the phone for AI processing using Google Gemini with zero data retention enabled. Once the response is generated, the image is discarded. The app also does not request microphone access, a deliberate privacy decision to ensure conversations aren't recorded or used as prompts for meditation.

Liminal decided against building navigation or hazard alerts into the experience. Moratti said the company considered whether to develop the ability to alert users to potential hazards, but the difficulty in building that reliably convinced them that avoiding navigation altogether was the correct choice for now. Instead, the experience focuses users on what they see in their surroundings.

Walking Meditation is separate from the existing Liminal VR app on Meta Quest. Moratti sees the two products as complementary, with the VR app providing escape from the real world while Walking Meditation is built to focus attention on the real world as users walk through it. Early testers found the experience feels different from listening to meditation recordings through headphones, with the environment becoming part of the meditation session itself.