Kleine Wunder / Little Wonders

Kleine Wunder explores the tiny wonder world of insects. In our daily perception, insects are often underrepresented or associated with negative images, yet they are essential for our survival. To open a closer view into their world, to observe their details, and perhaps to appreciate them more deeply, we have developed several 3D scanner prototypes and a complete pipeline over recent years, from raw scans to finished interactive 3D visualizations.

Each scan captures around 300 viewpoints and at least 60,000 photographs in total, roughly 600 GB of JPG data. These image stacks extend depth of field from only a few micrometers per shot to the whole insect. From these views, photogrammetry and additional processing steps produce a final dataset of around 200 MB, approximately a 3000x data reduction while preserving the essential information of the insect surface.
For online use, the dataset is further compressed to around 20 MB, corresponding to a total data reduction of approximately 30,000x.

With other prototypes and methods, scans with more than one million photos have also been produced and processed, but that is another story for another installation.

Please consider all scans presented here as test scans and works in progress rather than finished works. No color management or precise calibration was applied. As a result, some datasets - such as Weevil 2 - exhibit more pronounced errors and artifacts. In terms of resolution and level of detail, the scanner prototype used here is capable of achieving approximately three times higher quality under optimized conditions. A next-generation prototype currently under development is expected to deliver around five times more detail overall, along with improved geometric accuracy.