At the LWL Open-Air Museum Detmold in Germany, visitors can now explore historic spaces like never before. Through an innovative interactive installation powered by Volinga’s 3D Gaussian Splatting technology, the museum’s architecture and atmosphere are brought to life in immersive digital form, preserving cultural heritage while reimagining how history is experienced.
The LWL Open-Air Museum Detmold, one of Europe’s largest open-air museums, embarked on a pioneering project to digitize its historic buildings and grounds. The goal: to create an interactive, 3D digital exhibition for the museum’s new entrance building, allowing visitors to navigate through the site’s courtyards, interiors, and even areas typically closed to the public.
The result is a four-meter-wide screen installation controlled by a joystick, giving visitors the freedom to move through a detailed 3D reconstruction of the museum grounds. This installation blends traditional storytelling with cutting-edge visualization, turning physical heritage into an immersive, explorable world. This was a student-driven product by KreativInstitut.OWL in Germany.
To accurately capture the museum’s spaces, the team used a DJI Mini 4 Pro drone for aerial imagery and an XGRIDS Lixel Kity K1 handheld scanner for detailed interior scans. These datasets were processed into high-quality point clouds and Gaussian Splats, then reconstructed and rendered using Volinga Plugin and Unreal Engine.
Volinga’s software enabled the seamless conversion, editing, and optimization of 3DGS data, ensuring both visual fidelity and performance within an interactive environment. The result is an experience that feels both realistic and fluid – a true digital twin of the museum’s architecture.
The installation debuted during the museum’s media project presentations, alongside several complementary experiences including a VR walk-through and a virtual racing game set inside the digital museum. Eight student teams presented their work.
Feedback from visitors, project partners, and experts was overwhelmingly positive, with special recognition for how the project bridged the gap between cultural preservation and interactive media.
Encouraged by this success, the team is planning Phase 2 in the next school semester, which will expand the digitized areas of the museum and add more interactive functionality for visitors.
The LWL Open-Air Museum Detmold project demonstrates how Volinga empowers creators to preserve and share cultural heritage using 3D Gaussian Splatting. By merging state-of-the-art scanning with real-time rendering, the team has opened new pathways for museums and cultural institutions to make history accessible to everyone.
BOOK A DEMO to learn how Volinga helps cultural institutions, creators, and studios transform real-world environments into digital experiences.
Learn more about the project: https://kreativ.institute/en/projekte-und-beitraege/gaussian-splat/lwl-freilichtmuseum
Credits
Capture Device: DJI Mini 4 Pro drone / XGRIDS Lixel Kity K1
Educational Institute: KreativInstitut.OWL
Project Leads: Prof. Dr. Alexander Kutter and Sam Wiemann
Students: Aline Kuhlmann, Julia Söffker, and Thomas Patschke