Crafting an Immersive VR Experience for Quantious’ 2025 Offsite
Pushing the Boundaries of Virtual Prototyping
At Quantious, we thrive on innovation—not just for our clients, but within our own team. When planning our 2025 company retreat, we saw an opportunity to elevate the experience using immersive technology. Our retreats are a cornerstone of our company culture, offering a rare chance for our remote team to connect, collaborate, and recharge in an inspiring setting. This year, we wanted to build anticipation and provide a deeper sense of place before arrival, turning the lead-up to the trip into an experience of its own.
Our Lead Graphic Designer, Aaron Pendland, set out to create a fully immersive VR preview of the retreat, blending interactive storytelling, spatial design, and practical information into a single engaging experience. Using Shapes XR, a cutting-edge VR prototyping tool, this project served as both an internal showcase of VR capabilities and a functional trip guide for our team.
The result was a dynamic, interactive experience that transported users to Puerto Rico before they even packed their bags.
The Challenge
As our designer’s first project in Shapes, the goal was twofold:
Leverage as many features as possible while ensuring a seamless, user-friendly experience.
Make the experience widely accessible, integrating AR elements for team members less familiar with immersive VR.
While Shapes XR is primarily a prototyping tool, its recent updates in interactive trigger actions, 3D model imports, and UI design through Figma made it the ideal platform to bring this vision to life.
“I wanted to push the limits of what Shapes could do while making an experience that was actually useful for my team. This project wasn’t just about showcasing the retreat—it was about exploring how VR can enhance the way we plan, communicate, and experience events before they even happen.”
The Execution
To create a seamless experience, the project was structured using a storyboard approach, moving from broad to specific:
Introduction to Puerto Rico – Setting the scene with immersive visuals and sound design.
Exploration of the Retreat Location – Showcasing key landmarks with 3D terrain mapping.
Accommodation Walkthrough – A virtual tour of the hotel and amenities.
Event & Facilities Breakdown – Detailing planned activities, logistics, and team engagement opportunities.
Each scene was intentionally designed to retain elements from the previous one, reinforcing continuity and grounding users in a familiar space.
Tools & Techniques
Our designer leveraged Shapes’ built-in modeling tools and supplemented them with:
Gravity Sketch for complex 3D terrain
Blender for high-detail textures
SketchFab for additional assets
This hybrid approach ensured a high level of visual polish without compromising performance.
A standout improvement in Shapes v2 was its Figma integration, which streamlined UI creation. This allowed for a more professional and responsive interface, overcoming traditional VR-based UI constraints.
However, scene limitations within Shapes (capped at 50) presented a challenge. Even something as simple as a button rollover effect required duplicating entire scenes—a constraint that had to be navigated with strategic design choices.
The Result
The final experience combined stunning visuals, interactive elements, and music to create a truly immersive journey through the upcoming retreat. By blending VR and AR, the experience was accessible to all team members—ensuring even those new to VR could engage in a meaningful way.
More than just a preview, this project became a prototype for future immersive brand experiences, demonstrating the power of Shapes as a tool for storytelling, event previews, and team-building.
What’s Next
With this proof of concept in place, the next step is scaling the experience—designing multi-user environments where the team can collaborate, brainstorm, and push the boundaries of VR storytelling together. This means moving beyond a single-user preview to an interactive shared space, where teammates can explore, contribute ideas, and even customize elements in real time.
By incorporating multi-perspective viewpoints, dynamic interactions, and live collaboration tools, future iterations of this project will transform how we plan events, visualize creative concepts, and build immersive brand activations.
Because as we’ve learned, the possibilities in VR are as limitless as the space around us.