KLAY by Kunkun Interactive Earns CGconnect 3D Awards 2026 Nomination in Interactive VR/AR Experience and Digital Twins
- Rheza Kun
- Jun 14
- 5 min read
There are competitions that measure technical quality. And then there are competitions that measure where an industry is going.
The CGconnect 3D Awards — formerly known as the CGarchitect 3D Awards, one of the most respected recognition platforms in global architectural visualization — does both. It has been running since 2004. It has held ceremonies in Vienna, Los Angeles, San Diego, Boston, and La Coruña. It is where the world's finest visualization studios measure themselves against each other.
In 2026, the Awards returned with a live ceremony at the World Visualization Festival in Warsaw, Poland — the same stage where our founder, Rheza Eka Nugraha, had delivered his keynote earlier that week.
And on that stage, KLAY by Kunkun Interactive was named a nominee in the Interactive VR/AR Experience category.
What the Nomination Means
The Interactive VR/AR Experience category is the newest and arguably most forward-looking category in the CGconnect Awards. It does not honor a beautiful render or a cinematic film. It honors something more ambitious: an experience that places its audience inside architecture — that allows them to inhabit a space before it exists, and to make real decisions based on what they feel there.
KLAY was nominated alongside two other studios from Portugal and the United States, making it the only nominee from Southeast Asia in the category, and the only nominee built specifically as a sales tool for property developers rather than as an artistic or experimental project.
That distinction matters to us.
KLAY was not built to win awards. It was built because property developers in Indonesia and Malaysia needed a better way to sell unbuilt developments — and because their buyers deserved a better way to decide. The fact that the global visualization industry has recognized it as being among the finest interactive experiences produced anywhere in 2026 is meaningful precisely because the platform was built to solve a real commercial problem.
What KLAY Is, Explained Simply
KLAY is Kunkun Interactive's proprietary digital twin platform for real estate sales galleries.
It is built on Unreal Engine 5 — the same real-time rendering technology used by the world's most advanced game studios and visual effects houses — and delivered through Pixel Streaming, which means buyers can access the full experience from any browser or touchscreen without special hardware or downloads.
Inside a KLAY environment, a buyer at a sales gallery in Alor Setar, Jakarta, or Kuala Lumpur can do something that no brochure, scale model, or CGI film has ever allowed: they can walk through their future home before it is built.
They navigate from the lobby to the lift, from the corridor to the front door. They enter the unit, move through the living room, look out from the balcony. They switch between unit types instantly. They change the floor finish from timber to marble and watch the room transform around them. They explore the amenity floor — the pool, the gym, the garden terrace — and understand how these spaces relate to where they will live.
The decision they make at that touchscreen is not an imagined one. It is an experienced one.
Why This Recognition Matters for Indonesian Property Marketing
A nomination at a global awards with the history and standing of the CGconnect 3D Awards carries a specific signal: the standard of interactive property visualization being built in Indonesia is not just competitive locally — it is competitive globally.
This matters for the developers and property groups we work with across Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Middle East.
When an international buyer from Singapore, Dubai, or Hong Kong evaluates a development and encounters a KLAY experience in the sales gallery, they are encountering technology that has been recognized by the same institution that evaluates the world's finest visualization work. That context — even if the buyer never reads an awards announcement — shapes their perception of the developer's quality and seriousness.
Great sales tools do not just help buyers decide. They communicate, silently, that the developer cares about every aspect of the buyer's experience — including the experience of choosing.
The 2026 Awards: Context for Digital Twin, VR, and Interactive Experience
The 2026 CGconnect 3D Awards was a particularly significant edition. For the first time, the awards ceremony was held as part of the World Visualization Festival in Warsaw — a convergence of two major global events in the same location, in the same week.
KLAY competed in the Interactive VR/AR Experience category against Nooked from Portugal and Elephant Skin from the United States — both studios with strong international reputations in immersive visualization. Being named alongside them is a validation of the technical and creative quality that our team has invested in the platform since we first began building it.
The full nominee list, including KLAY's entry in the Interactive category, can be viewed at the CGconnect 3D Awards website: 3dawards.chaos.com
Full Article : https://cgconnect.chaos.com/insights/articles/c3d3e548-the-2026-3d-awards-nominees-are-here
What Comes Next for KLAY
A nomination is a milestone, not a destination.
We are continuing to develop KLAY as a platform — expanding its capabilities in unit configuration, material customization, and integration with physical sales gallery hardware. We are deploying new KLAY installations for developers across Indonesia, Malaysia, and increasingly the Gulf region, where appetite for immersive pre-sales experiences among luxury residential buyers is growing rapidly.
And we are working toward the next generation of the platform: a web-based version of KLAY that allows developers to extend the sales gallery experience to buyers anywhere in the world — without requiring them to visit in person.
The goal has not changed since the day we started building KLAY: to give property buyers a way to feel their future home. Not to look at it. Not to imagine it.
To feel it.
If you are a property developer planning a launch and want to understand what KLAY could mean for your sales gallery and your buyers, we would love to have that conversation.
Great design deserves to be felt. Not just seen.
— Kunkun Interactive Team
Kunkun Interactive is an award-winning interactive visualization studio based in Bandung, Indonesia and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. KLAY, our proprietary digital twin platform, has been nominated at the CGconnect 3D Awards 2026 in the Interactive VR/AR Experience category. Get in touch to discuss your next project.
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