Lauffenmühle Museum — industrial history digitally preserved.
The Lauffenmühle Industrial Museum preserves the history of the textile factory that shaped the site for nearly 200 years. We captured the museum fully in 3D in 2025 — exhibition rooms, historic looms and especially delicate exhibits in detailed resolution. A complement to the large hybrid model of the industrial site, but with its own purpose: making education, tourism and research digitally accessible.
Capturing industrial history before it disappears.
The Lauffenmühle site has two identities: the active industrial and commercial site, which we already documented as a hybrid 120,000 m² model in 2024 — and the industrial museum, which preserves the textile history of the site since the early 19th century. The two models complement each other but serve completely different purposes.
The challenge at the museum: delicacy. Historic looms, spinning machines, original documents and tools may not be touched. Lighting conditions in the exhibition rooms are deliberately gentle on the artefacts for conservation reasons — often dimmed. Some exhibits sit behind glass or in display cases.
We therefore worked with three graduated capture levels: Matterport Pro3 LiDAR for the exhibition rooms and main machines, handheld scanners for particularly valuable or delicate exhibits, and high-resolution photogrammetry for textures, building inscriptions and detail labelling. High-resolution data, fully contactless.
At a glance.
Our approach in 4 stages.
Conservation coordination
Walk-through with the museum director — which exhibits may be captured and how, what lighting is possible, which areas are off-limits.
Matterport main scan
Full capture of all exhibition rooms with Matterport Pro3 LiDAR — under normal exhibition lighting. Scan stations carefully placed to keep every artefact in view without disturbing visitors and without display-case reflections distorting the data.
Handheld-scanner detail
Sub-millimetre capture of selected exhibits: an original loom from 1898, several spinning-machine components, textile-sample books. All contactless, from a distance of 20–80 cm.
Handover and web tour
Matterpak bundle for the museum archive, separate detail meshes of the handheld-scanned exhibits, plus a public web tour as an extension of the museum's offering — accessible even outside opening hours.
Four applications from a single dataset.
Digital archive
The detail scans of the historic machines record the current state unambiguously — as a baseline for conservation work over the coming decades.
Virtual tour
The public web tour makes the museum accessible beyond opening hours — barrier-free and for school classes across the entire DACH region.
Research & teaching
Universities and research institutions can access the high-resolution detail meshes on request — for textile-history and industrial-archaeology studies.
Extended exhibition
Tablets in the museum optionally show visitors complementary 3D detail views of exhibits that are otherwise hard to experience behind glass — straight from the same data source.
We now have a data foundation that permanently safeguards our collection — and at the same time makes it pedagogically usable. Previously neither of these was possible at all, or only with very high manual effort.
Digitally safeguard a museum, collection or monument?
We advise on the right capture strategy for cultural institutions — conservation-friendly, eligible for funding, usable long-term.