Museum Digitization: How the LWL Open-Air Museum in Detmold Uses Immersive Tech to Open Restricted Spaces

Case Studies2026.02.106 min read

Immersive tech is reshaping heritage access. At the LWL Open-Air Museum Detmold, historic buildings are often off-limits to protect them. To solve this, a student team used XGRIDS's Lixel Kity K1 & PortalCam to create a navigable, photorealistic 3D twin of the entire 90-hectare site in days. Visitors can now explore every corner on a 4-meter touchscreen, gaining a holistic understanding before setting foot outside. This "capture once, deploy everywhere" model—extending to VR and web—proves that cutting-edge spatial computing can make fragile history universally accessible without compromise. Thanks for Prof. Dr. Alexander Kutter, LWL-Freilichtmuseum Detmold and Volinga help.

At one of Europe's largest open-air museums, the most historically significant buildings are often the ones visitors can never enter. LWL Open-Air Museum Detmold turned this paradox into an opportunity: if physical doors must stay closed, digital space can remain open.

When Scale and Preservation Limit Physical Access

LWL Open-Air Museum Detmold spans 90 hectares with 120 historic buildings scattered across the landscape, documenting 500 years of Westphalian everyday culture. That scale creates a structural dilemma. Visitors can never see the entire site in one visit, and some of its most important buildings cannot be entered — conservation requirements, structural fragility, and safety regulations restrict physical access for visitors.

If physical access is limited, orientation becomes critical. The museum's new entrance area was designed to orient first-time visitors before they begin exploring. But how do you introduce a site that visitors cannot fully enter? Guided tours protect the collections but increase wear and staffing demands. Photo panels and videos fragment the experience or impose linear narratives. None conveys how 120 buildings across 11 landscapes connect as a whole.

This challenge becomes even more pronounced during the winter months. While the museum’s new exhibition building and entrance area remain open year-round, the outdoor site is closed for extended maintenance and to protect the historic structures from harsh weather. As a result, winter visitors have no way to perceive the scale, structure, or breadth of the museum as a whole, despite being physically present on site.

What the museum needed was a new form of orientation: one that helps visitors build a reliable mental map of scale, structure, and key spatial relationships without opening doors or visiting every building.

A Streamlined, Accessible Pipeline

To address this, KreativInstitut.OWL developed an immersive, navigable digital twin of the entire museum site.

Rather than relying on manual 3D modeling, which is slow, costly, and often visually artificial, the team adopted a direct spatial capture workflow that preserved real-world scale, detail, and continuity.

Project setup

Team: 5 students supervised by Prof. Dr. Alexander Kutter

Capture

XGRIDS Lixel Kity K1 handheld scanner & PortalCam for interiors and architectural details
DJI Mini 4 Pro for outdoor and aerial data

Processing and Rendering

Reconstructed as 3D Gaussian Splats in Lixel CyberColor
Imported and rendered in Unreal Engine via the Volinga Plugin

Despite the toolchain including multiple devices, the workflow proved accessible to a small, non-specialist team. The student group had little to no prior experience with 3D spatial capture or Unreal Engine at the outset of the project, aside from limited support from a student with previous Unreal Engine exposure.

In a traditional workflow, achieving a decent level of density and texture quality would typically require a seasoned surveying team. By contrast, XGRIDS’ automated processing and intuitive hardware significantly lowered the barrier to producing industrial-grade digital output. All core steps, from capture to reconstruction and interactive deployment, were learned and executed within the project timeframe itself.

On-Site Capture Under Real-World Constraints

The on-site capture phase demonstrated a level of efficiency that would be difficult to achieve with conventional methods. Traditional static LiDAR workflows for a site of this scale would typically require weeks or even months of fieldwork, involving fixed tripods, repeated station setups, and potential disruption to visitor flow.

By adopting the XGRIDS Lixel Kity K1 and PortalCam, the team could conduct continuous, walk-through capture, compressing the capture timeline from weeks to days. The entire Paderborn Village sector was digitized within just two days. Individual buildings, including narrow interiors, upper floors, and poorly lit spaces, were captured in single on-site sessions lasting approximately three to four hours each.

Even under challenging environmental conditions, such as interiors without installed lighting, the capture process remained stable and predictable, allowing scanning to be completed without extended site closures or disruption to museum operations.

Operator scanning a historic furnished room interior with the XGRIDS PortalCam spatial camera

Scanning with PortalCam

Operator walking between half-timbered museum houses while scanning with the Lixel Kity K1 handheld scanner

Scanning with Lixel Kity K1

From Single Capture to a Multi-Platform Ecosystem

Once the site had been captured, a deeper question emerged: how should this spatial knowledge actually be used by visitors?

The entrance area installation answers this with a navigable 3D model on a 4-meter screen controlled physically. Visitors move freely across the landscape, follow paths, and even enter normally off-limits interiors. Understanding is experiential rather than explanatory. Visitors grasp the museum’s scale by viewing it from above, understand spatial layouts by navigating through it, and trust its realism through meticulously crafted details. Even subtle touches — like seeing the pond surface at eye level alongside ducks — make the experience feel authentic and reliable.

The same captured environment powers multiple formats and extends beyond the entrance hall:

Immersive VR: Walkable experiences on Meta Quest 3.
Remote Access: WebXR for PC and mobile users.
Interactive Gaming: Playful elements to engage younger audiences.

This "Create Once, Deploy Everywhere" approach transforms a static dataset into a living, long-term asset. This flexibility is inherent to the XGRIDS ecosystem: with an open LCC format and broad compatibility—ranging from native SDKs for Unreal Engine and Unity to partner tools like SuperSplat and Volinga—the technology ensures that data is never locked in, but remains ready for any future application.

The museum team explicitly described themselves as “especially happy and really impressed” by the visual fidelity and how effectively the infrastructure opens previously inaccessible spaces

Public launch is scheduled for mid-2026.

Visitor at the entrance installation viewing the navigable 3D digital twin of the museum on screens

Interactive game driving a buggy through a photorealistic 3D reconstruction of a historic museum room

A Proven Blueprint for Heritage Access

LWL Open Air Museum Detmold’s project demonstrates that restricted access no longer limits understanding. Visitors gain a holistic mental map before physically entering.

More importantly, this is not a one-off experiment. The workflow operates under real-world museum conditions, including limited staffing, mixed technical skill levels, operational constraints, and long-term public use requirements. Capture, reconstruction, and deployment were completed within a predictable timeline using a stable, repeatable pipeline that supports multiple platforms without duplication of effort.

For heritage institutions worldwide facing similar preservation and accessibility challenges, this project offers a validated reference. It demonstrates how the physical limits of historic sites can be addressed through cutting-edge technologies, transforming a single capture into durable infrastructure that supports orientation, education, and long-term engagement.

Spatial technologies by XGRIDS: https://www.xgrids.com/intl

LWL Open-Air Museum Detmold: https://www.lwl-freilichtmuseum-detmold.de/en/

KreativInstitut.OWL: https://kreativ.institute/en/