Hero Zone: Where Social VR Meets Real-World Revenue -
Interstellar Arc is a 20,000-square-foot free-roam VR attraction at AREA15 in Las Vegas. It stopped selling tickets on August 18, 2026. Felix & Paul Studios opened it on October 22, 2025. Its booking site lists no departures. Google Maps shows the attraction as temporarily closed. Employees say the studio itself has closed. Neither Felix & Paul Studios nor AREA15 has issued a statement.
Employees of the Montreal studio described a closure on LinkedIn the same day. Alexis Morin, the studio’s technical art director, posted that “Felix & Paul studios unfortunately had to close its doors and left the entire team #OpenToWork.” Pierre Blaizeau, formerly vice president of technology and operations, posted that “we’re collectively closing this chapter.” Alex Quevillon, an Unreal Engine programmer who spent seven and a half years at the studio, posted “c’est fini.” Jean-Pascal Beaudoin, the studio’s audio director, posted that the studio “has come to an end.” Project manager Jazmine Darragh described an “unexpected close following the company’s closure.” Ian Hamilton of Good Virtual Reality reported a possible closure on August 18. XRMust reported on August 19 that multiple employees had confirmed the studio closed its doors.
Felix & Paul Studios announced Interstellar Arc in December 2024. Tickets went on sale on July 28, 2025. The attraction opened on October 22, 2025 in a custom-built venue in AREA15’s Zone 2, The Terminals. The experience ran 60 minutes, with departures every 15 minutes from noon to 9 p.m. Timed-entry tickets were listed at $49 for adults and $39 for children, locals and military. Private buyouts started at $30,000. The studio said the venue could handle hundreds of guests an hour. It described the physical set as larger than four basketball courts. A 60-minute experience with departures every 15 minutes puts four groups in the venue at once. That is arithmetic from the published cadence, not an operator figure.
Guests walked a centrifuge-shaped set with railings bent to match the virtual ship, using redirected walking to make the path feel endless. The Arc won Best Location-Based Entertainment at the 2026 Auggie Awards and was selected by the Toronto International Film Festival in July. The Las Vegas Weekly published an interview with co-founder Félix Lajeunesse on August 6, twelve days before the site stopped listing departures. The booking page showed a 4.7 guest rating on the day it stopped selling.
Paul Raphaël, co-founder and chief innovation officer of Felix & Paul Studios, spoke with The VR Collective in March 2026 about the business of the Arc. Asked about the hardest part of getting the experience in front of ticket buyers, he said: “The toughest part is communicating what the experience is. Because you need to do that in as little, and as condensed a form as humanly possible. You might see a poster. If you’re promoting a movie, you just need to get a sense of who are the actors, what’s the story, what’s the genre. If it’s a theater, if it’s a concert, everyone knows what those are. No one knows what this is.”
“Putting on the show, all the tech, getting the money, all of that was hard, sure,” Raphaël said. “But the toughest part is communicating what it is, because once we get them in there, we almost always have a very positive reaction.”
Raphaël also said audience education started over every time the studio’s touring show The Infinite changed cities. He said part of the public is put off by the term VR before hearing the pitch. He said the Arc’s shape could not tour, which made it a permanent installation, and that the studio was looking for a second location.
Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart anchors AREA15’s main building. It had drawn 13 million visitors by the end of 2024, by the company’s count. Interstellar Arc sat across the lot in Zone 2, The Terminals. A tram runs to that expansion district from the main parking. AREA15 listed the district’s tenants in January 2026. Five were open: Universal Horror Unleashed, Interstellar Arc, an escape game, a pop-up café and a game show. The list named a dozen more as coming in 2026, among them iFLY, a Museum of Ice Cream flagship and a row of restaurants.
“Walk-by traffic from the main building would have helped a little, but the bigger problem was that nothing was open around the Arc, no restaurant, no bar, no second reason to make the trip,” said Bob Cooney, a VR consultant and executive director of LEXRA, the trade association for location-based XR, who began his career operating immersive location-based entertainment in 1989. “That leaves buying the customers, and Las Vegas is the most competitive entertainment market in the world. Meow Wolf, the anchor tenant at AREA15, spends close to ten million dollars a year on advertising. The public has a word for a movie, a concert, an escape room. There is no word for this yet, so every operator who opens re-teaches the market from zero, alone, and the Arc was doing that in the most expensive place there is. The studio’s other business is content for consumer headsets, and that market is soft too.” Cooney publishes The VR Collective.
Lajeunesse, Raphaël and Stéphane Rituit founded Felix & Paul Studios in Montreal in 2013. Its credits include Space Explorers: The ISS Experience, filmed aboard the International Space Station, and two Primetime Emmy Awards. Hamilton reported that the studio was already operating at reduced capacity before this week’s departures. No one from the studio’s leadership has confirmed a closure. XRMust reported that the fate of the studio’s intellectual property, its partnerships and its existing location-based installations remains uncertain. Those installations include The Infinite, the touring show it developed with PHI Studio.
Interstellar Arc closed inside ten months, in a district where most announced tenants had not opened. Operators weighing a first-tenant position in a new district are carrying the cost of building that district’s audience until the rest of it opens. Investors in destination VR attractions have Raphaël’s March account of which part was hardest: communicating what the experience is.
Why did Interstellar Arc close? Felix & Paul Studios has not said. The ticket site stopped listing departures on August 18, 2026, Google Maps shows it temporarily closed, and studio employees posted on LinkedIn that the studio had closed its doors.
Is Felix & Paul Studios closing? Employees across audio, technical art, engineering and production posted on LinkedIn on August 18 and 19 that the studio had closed and the team was looking for work, and XRMust reported the closure as confirmed by multiple employees. The company itself has made no announcement.
How long was Interstellar Arc open? It opened October 22, 2025 and stopped selling tickets August 18, 2026, just under ten months.
Where was Interstellar Arc in AREA15? In Zone 2, The Terminals, the expansion district across the lot from the main building, reached by tram.
Will Interstellar Arc reopen or move? Raphaël told The VR Collective in March the studio was looking for a second location. Nothing has been announced.
