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the step-inside viewer
liminals.space lets you step inside a generated room in 3D, right in your browser. No app, no upload for the 3D part. It builds a depth map of your room on your own device and turns a still image into a space you can move through.
4 photos · see 2 rooms free · no account · your photos aren't saved.
When you look at a photo of a place you used to know, something is missing. The image is flat. You can see the hallway but you can't turn your head and look down it. You can see the ceiling tiles but you can't look up at them the way you actually would.
The 3D viewer changes that. It takes your generated liminal room and infers where every surface sits in space: the floor receding away from you, the walls converging at their corners, the light fitting hanging overhead. Then it lets you drift through it: tilt, pan, push forward into the corridor. It's not a full game engine. It's closer to what your memory actually does, a partial, hazy geometry that you can inhabit just enough to feel the scale of the place.
After your photos are processed into liminal-space images, the app runs a depth-estimation pass on one of the generated rooms. This pass analyses the image pixel by pixel and assigns each one an estimated distance from the camera (dark for close, light for far, or the reverse depending on the scene). That depth map gets fed into a WebGL renderer running in your browser tab, which warps the image onto a three-dimensional mesh. The result is a parallax you can drive: move your mouse left and the room swings slightly, scroll forward and the far end of the hallway gets closer.
On a device with a decent GPU, the frame rate is smooth. On older or low-end phones it still works, just at a lower rate. The viewer uses standard WebGL (Chrome, Firefox, Safari 16+, and Edge), so no plugin or download is needed.
Running the 3D stage on your device rather than a remote server has two effects that matter to you specifically.
Privacy. The rooms generated from your photos are personal. They're reconstructions of the places you actually lived. The depth-map computation and the WebGL rendering never leave your machine, which means no second system ever sees the inside of that childhood bedroom or that hallway from your old school.
Speed. There's no round-trip to a server. The moment your generated image is ready, the viewer is ready. You press the step-inside button and you're in. No queue, no loading spinner while a remote GPU warms up.
People describe it as the closest thing to being inside a dream of a place rather than a photograph of it. The specific quality of liminal spaces, that sense that the room has been emptied right before you arrived and something just happened and you missed it, is amplified by depth. A flat image of an empty corridor is eerie. The same corridor rendered in three dimensions, where you can push forward and feel the far end getting slightly larger, is something else.
The viewer doesn't pretend to be photorealistic. It's deliberately soft at the edges where the depth estimation is uncertain, which ends up looking right for a liminal space. The way the exact details of a memory go fuzzy the further you are from the centre.
No account is created at any point. Your photos are deleted after processing: they're used once to generate your rooms and never stored. Everything else (the 3D stage, the video, the keepsake) lives in your browser session until you download it.
The 3D viewer is one part of the full experience. The same unlock also gives you the VHS-style memory video, a slow, degraded-tape edit of your rooms that plays like footage recovered from somewhere you shouldn't have found it, and a downloadable keepsake bundle with your full-resolution images and a print-ready PDF. An optional higher tier removes the watermark and music track, leaving clean files for posting or printing.
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