Textile Heritage That Generated RM 3.2M in Media Value.
Client
IKAT Malaysia
Category
Immersive Exhibition
Technology
Interactive Installations · AR · Projection
Cities
Kuala Lumpur · Sarawak · Johor
Gallery
Results
Visitors
Media Value
Social Reach
Cities
The Brief
IKAT Malaysia sought to revitalize interest in the country's traditional textile heritage — particularly among younger audiences — and tour the experience across three cities. Traditional craft exhibitions in Malaysia historically struggle with footfall: the artefacts are extraordinary, but the storytelling rarely competes with a generation raised on phone screens.
The brief asked for an exhibition that could travel across Kuala Lumpur, Sarawak and Johor, hold the attention of 18–34 audiences, and produce content valuable enough that media outlets and social influencers would amplify it organically. It also had to respect the textile artefacts themselves — never reducing the craft to a backdrop for technology.
What We Created
EDT designed and produced a touring immersive exhibition that wove together interactive installations, projection mapping, WebAR triggers and tangible textile experiences into a single cohesive journey. Visitors entered through a projection-mapped corridor where traditional Malaysian patterns dissolved and reformed in response to their movement, setting up the show's central idea: heritage as something living, not something archived.
At the core of the exhibition were generative-art stations where TouchDesigner-driven visuals reinterpreted ikat motifs in real time, alongside WebAR overlays that surfaced the cultural and historical context behind each pattern. The result was an exhibition that generated RM 3.2M in earned media value, 382,720 social impressions, and brought 5,822 paying and walk-in visitors across the three-city tour.
Heritage That Travels
IKAT Malaysia became the most-covered heritage exhibition of its tour cycle, with features in national press and pickup from regional design and culture publications. More importantly, the exhibition demonstrated a replicable model for heritage tourism: an installation light enough to tour, technical enough to surprise digital-first audiences, and respectful enough that it could anchor cultural programming for government and museum partners.
For EDT, the project consolidated a methodology now applied across heritage and tourism briefs — pairing tangible artefact display with generative and AR layers that increase dwell time and amplify shareability without diluting the source material.