Montreal Studio Brings VR Space Travel to Vegas
Ever wonder what space exploration will be like centuries from now? After working with NASA on virtual-reality documentaries, Montreal’s Felix & Paul Studios pivots to fiction for Interstellar Arc, a permanent VR experience in Las Vegas that lets Earthlings travel the universe.
Interstellar Arc is a fully immersive one-hour experience that turns visitors into long-distance space travellers on a 262-year journey to an Earth-like planet beyond our solar system.
With your VR headset on, you start the adventure by waking from a deep cryogenic sleep, and then you explore a 20,000-square-foot virtual spaceship.
“The Arc is kind of a culmination of everything we’ve done so far,” says Félix Lajeunesse, co-founder and creative director of the Montreal-based immersive entertainment company Felix & Paul Studios.
Best known for its documentaries, Felix & Paul has also made award-winning fiction, including Miyubi, a 2017 VR film that starred Jeff Goldblum (The Big Chill, Jurassic Park, Independence Day) and won a Peabody in the Futures of Media category.
To ensure that Interstellar Arc was grounded in reality, Felix & Paul worked with the family of the late American astronomer Carl Sagan, drawing inspiration from the work Sagan had done with NASA. They also drew on science-fiction classics from throughout literary history.
“I grew up reading comics by Mœbius and Philippe Druillet,” says Lajeunesse. “In the 1970s, there was incredible creative freedom in European comic strips. There was this idea of limitless imagination, and that’s the feeling we wanted to capture with Interstellar Arc. I feel we’ve managed to strike the right balance between scientific accuracy and imagination.”
Settling Down in One Place
The team learned a lot from Felix & Paul’s previous projects, including Space Explorers: The Infinite, an immersive experience inspired by NASA missions that has been touring major cities since 2021.
“Setting up and dismantling a show of this magnitude in each city is a colossal task,” says Lajeunesse. “For our next project we wanted to design an event for a single location.”
That location is Las Vegas. More specifically, AREA15, a vast immersive complex outside the Strip that brings together more than 20 activities and experiences.
Permanent residency not only simplified the job but improved the finished product, according to Lajeunesse. “Staying in a single location allows us to take staging to the next level, with a pre- and post-event experience that is truly memorable,” he says.
It wasn’t hard to convince AREA15.
“We choose our partners based on their capabilities,” said Michael Casper, AREA15’s vice president of business development, while at the HUB Montreal conference this past October. “Some have creative vision, others have the operational capability to implement big concepts, and others are able to secure funding. Few, like Felix & Paul Studios, have all three.”
Overcoming Creative and Technological Challenges
It took three years to develop Interstellar Arc, which finally opened last month.
“We didn’t follow a strict script because we were in completely new territory. We learned as we went along,” said Stéphane Rituit, Felix & Paul co-founder and CEO, also at HUB Montreal.
The experience can accommodate 170 space travellers per hour, including 40 minutes in which they roam free through the spaceship guided by their Meta Quest 3S VR headsets. “An immersive experience like this gives you the impression of having total freedom so you can move about naturally,” Lajeunesse says. “The big challenge was providing participants an exciting narrative journey without them feeling like they’re being led.”
The show also faced its share of technological challenges, including how to have participants move through a physical space that’s one-third the size of what they experience virtually. The solution was to engineer algorithms that give players the impression they’re walking in a straight line when they’re actually moving in a loop.
Just the Beginning?
Interstellar Arc is expected to evolve in the months ahead. “Having a little more time to fulfill our vision, the experience will be enhanced. But it won’t be too radically different,” says Lajeunesse.
While shows that are permanently grounded in one location often have to reinvent themselves to keep audiences coming back, that’s not the case in America’s gambling capital because, as Casper noted, the audience in Las Vegas changes every three days.
Of course, the show could have a sequel, since the expedition ends when the planet is discovered.
“The ending is rewarding but it also feels a lot like just the first chapter in an ongoing story,” says Lajeunesse. “We don’t have a fixed plan yet, but we would definitely like to tell the rest of the story.”
