Immersive Asia

I took advantage of a recent trip to Asia to check out the immersive experience scene in two big cities : Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur. If when I left the region after COVID there where very few offerings, it seems the global trend has caught up there too. Actually it is by accident that I decided to check out the scene as I couldn’t but notice the big promotion in Bangkok for Disney Immersive, currently showing at the city’s newest retail destination : Emsphere.

I have been interested in family entertainment for shopping malls since 2010 when I started Celebrating Life in Hong Kong. A lot of the clients and concepts we worked on where for retail operators, including Beast Park in Kuala Lumpur of which I was one of the 3 founders. And now that I am well versed in the immersive experience industry I can see the opportunity for shopping malls with large empty spaces (whether intentionally or not) to seek for these immersive experiences that offer quality and memorable experiences to their visitors.

In Bangkok, the combination of Disney powerhouse IP’s, a leading retail destination and one of Asia’s largest entertainment companies (Base Entertainment) is surely a recipe for success. Last year, it was Emsphere’s competitor, Iconsiam, who offered one of the Van Gogh’s alive experiences. When in Kuala Lumpur, I took a day to test the 2 immersive experiences currently showing in the city.

Let’s start with Art and Symphony: the Immersive Journey. A two-month partnership between a local studio which had been the local partner for a past Van Gogh’s alive experience (this has got to be the immersive experience that travelled the most!), a shopping mall in the heart of the tourist district (Fahrenheit) and operated by the country’s leading retail company (Pavilion), and Klook, a leading leisure and attractions ticketing company aiming to be another Fever in the region.

It was opened for a week when I went and the reviews online were good. Despite a high price (18.5€ for a foreigner and 14.5€ for a Malaysian), it was busy during my visit on a Friday evening. A good mix of couples on a date, families and small groups of friends.

On the 3rd floor of the mall, the exhibition occupies a good 20,000sft with a nice ticketing/retail area visible from the atrium and inside 6-7 exhibition rooms on each side of a corridor with temporary partitions and a big area at the end with café, chill zone and retail.

The concept is between teamLab and a selfie museum, with big use of AI photography. Visitors are invited to scan a QR code to access a platform that will help manage the picture taking process inside. They are welcomed by the statues of 4 music composers with their bios introducing the 4 moods of the 4 music-related rooms. Each room offers a different interaction, from the usual wall projections where visitors can see their bodies dancing or change the visuals with hand gestures to more basic (but efficient) displays like fans controlled by people’s voices in microphones lifting a veil and creating moving shapes. Visitors are surprised and interactions are well explained together with some information on the music pieces.

On the other side of the corridor, the rooms are dedicated to famous impressionist painters with various displays that are more like photo opportunities. The Van Gogh bedroom is probably coming from the previous Van Gogh alive exhibition! In this area visitors are introduced to the AI photography booths which turns them into impressionist paintings. Quite cool! There is also a UV light room.

Clearly the intention with this experience is to leverage as many free IP’s as possible (great composers, impressionists) to cast the biggest audience. But the link between them is clever I think and the educational content is well dosed. It carries a bigger message that it is OK to play with art and that we can all be artists. There is a real effort and no cutting corners. Social interactions like learning how to conduct an orchestra, a cake that can be decorated with edible paint in the café or a mural to draw on are appreciated by visitors. I liked that there was a chill room with bean bags and projection mapping after the café, which felt like a bonus.

Overall I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the content and the variety of the interactions that made it closer to an immersive experience in my opinion than Atelier des Lumières for example. I can see how this format, between teamLab and a selfie museum (with the new AI photography), has a potential to develop more widely. That same day I went to see Twilight at REXPERIENCE located in RexKL a former 1960’s cinema turned lifestyle centre for cool kids (expresso bar, wine bar, funky food court, book store, tattoo studio, etc).

After trying a few things with the big gutted-out cinema hall, the owners turned it into the first permanent immersive new media art venue in Malaysia (for both locals and tourists), with a mission to support local artists. A bit like Atelier des Lumières the hall is fully decked with projectors and sound systems. Every few months the one-hour show (with several pieces) will change and at night live sessions will include musicians or dancers.

The price is a bit lower at 12.5€. For the 7pm show on a Friday there were only 3 people in the room. Maybe because it has been playing since August. There seemed to be more people for the next show when I left.

I wasn’t sure how it worked so I sat for the first piece (batik-inspired visuals telling the story of Malaysia) and got quickly bored. I came out and found out after speaking with the attendants that there were other pieces coming, which were both pretty cool, especially the last one with a old TV set in the middle of the room interacting with massive wall projections. Evidently it is not the crowd pleasing content of a typical immersive exhibition, a bit more experimental, and that can explain the smaller audience.

So what’s my take on this?

I was most impressed by the fact that it seems immersive experiences are in the hands of big players in the region: big retail companies, big tourist destinations (RexKL), big entertainment companies, big event companies (one of them is organizing a Japanese anime Jujutsu Kaisen exhibition on the same floor as Art and Symphony in Kuala Lumpur). And this gives me hope that we will see innovation coming from this market like we saw with teamLab from Japan.

It shows also that some of our big players in France should be more active, and I am thinking mostly about entertainment companies and event companies. This is probably the best way to convince big retail companies and destinations to be more active as well.