Dent 2025: Félix Lajeunesse and Paul Raphaël of Felix & Paul Studios on Redefining a Medium — and a Market
Long-time Denter Kyle Kesterson recently connected us with Co-Founder & Chief Creative Officer Félix Lajeunesse and Co-Founder & Chief Innovation Officer Paul Raphaël of Felix & Paul Studios, the EMMY®-winning immersive entertainment studio that has become a category-defining leader in immersive entertainment.
Félix and Paul will be appearing onstage at our 2025 Santa Fe conference, and in preparation for their fireside chat with Dent Co-Founder Jason Preston, we learned more about what they are working on today, and their remarkable evolution from VR content creators to becoming leaders in the world of location-based experiences (LBE).
Felix & Paul Studios has achieved a level of success that is truly impressive, positioning them not just as participants in the virtual reality space, but as the architects who are defining its future. Their clients and collaborators have included NASA, Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic World team, Industrial Light & Magic, and Cirque du Soleil.
Felix & Paul Studios originally rose to prominence as a pioneer in cinematic virtual reality. Despite achieving critical acclaim, the studio faced serious strategic challenges. By the late 2010s, the consumer VR market was “stuck in a rut” and the studio’s existing business model relied on the unsustainable cycle of convincing technology platforms, such as Meta, to fund new content.
They performed a remarkable pivot and moved from creating content for individual headsets to launching Space Explorers: The Infinite, a large-scale immersive exhibition that transports audiences into life aboard the International Space Station. This move allowed them to bypass the niche VR gamer demographic and ultimately “discover a business model that worked,” giving them direct audience access and financial independence.
Dent conference speaker, and Chief Vision Officer at Meow Wolf, Vince Kadlubek has endorsed their vision, asserting Felix & Paul Studios are creators bringing “visionary storytelling to our shared space of boundary-pushing experiences.”
Their latest creation is Interstellar Arc, a large-scale immersive experience, blending mixed reality, interactive storytelling, and space exploration, opening at AREA15 in Las Vegas in October 2025. In this experience, participants embark on a voyage to humanity’s new home: the exoplanet Arcadia, located 11.4 light years away. The experience is described as “a multi-sensory, immersive odyssey of epic scale” with “full-spectrum immersion: engineered, calibrated, absolute.” (For more information, visit https://www.interstellararc.com/).
Félix Lajeunesse and Paul Raphaël of Felix & Paul Studios, speaking at Dent 2025 in Santa Fe
In our recent conversations with both Félix and Paul, several enduring Dent themes came into play as a part of the Felix & Paul Studios philosophy. Here are just a couple:
The synthesis of art and science: Facilitating the integration of creative vision and technological execution has been a consistent theme at the Dent conference since 2013, and resonates with our audience of entrepreneurs, technologists, and creatives. Like Apple, Pixar and others before them, Felix & Paul Studios has prevented a culture where technology dictates art, or where it pursues creative demands that are technically unfeasible. Denter Alvy Ray Smith, Co-Founder of Pixar, once said “...one of the secrets of Pixar’s success is our willingness to have both types of creative talent, technological and artistic, under one roof and treated in one dignified way. There’s always been a mutual admiration society between the two types of creators at Pixar.”
Pursuing breakthroughs by “unlearning” old paradigms: The studio recognized early that the established language of cinema was not just irrelevant but detrimental to creating authentic VR experiences. Felix & Paul Studios was willing to abandon the successful playbooks of the past, and build on a new operational language. It didn’t wait for the industry to figure out a new model. Instead, it innovated a new path forward. As Steve Jobs said, “If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will.”
We’re looking forward to welcoming them to the Dent 2025 stage. For more information and to apply to attend Dent 2025, September 14-16, in Santa Fe, NM, visit this page.
