What I am working on with the CGVR team and our partners — and the earlier projects that shaped the toolbox.
Multimodal XR — EU project, coordinated by the University of Bremen
Multisensory extended reality: combining visual, auditory and haptic channels into coherent immersive experiences. Rene contributes to the project coordination and the requirements definition (WP1).
Heterogeneous robot swarms for Mars exploration (DLR) — overall coordinator of the initiative
A swarm of rovers, hoppers and drones autonomously exploring the Valles Marineris. I coordinate the initiative as a whole across its partner institutions; CGVR builds the virtual testbed (VaMEx-VTB) for validating swarm navigation before any hardware exists, and VR interfaces for planning exploration missions.
Haptic rendering inside modern game engines
A plugin system that brings 1 kHz haptic loops, grasping and — most recently — multi-contact devices (UnrealHaptics-MC, Eurohaptics 2026) to Unreal Engine 5. Open source.
With Thammasat University and Mahidol University, Thailand
Haptic VR simulators for endodontics and indirect-vision dentistry, evaluated in randomized controlled trials; plus HIPS, a hip arthroplasty simulator with realistic bone-milling force feedback.
SmartOT / autonomous surgical lamps / shadow-free projection
Autonomous, module-based surgical lighting that keeps the wound illuminated without manual repositioning, and projection mapping onto dynamic, deformable surfaces without shadows.
Multi-objective packing of arbitrary objects into arbitrary containers
Sphere-packing based algorithms for dense placement of 3D objects, with applications from logistics to gravitational field modelling of asteroids.
Web-based benchmarking of collision detection libraries
The successor of our original benchmarking suite: upload your algorithm, run standardized scenarios on our servers and compare.
Personal side projects: generative synthesizers, MIDI tooling and real-time visuals, written in C++ with JUCE and Qt/OpenGL. All of it on GitHub.
Composes and synthesizes complete psytrance sets from a seed — Goa, Full-On, Progressive, Dark Forest, Hi-Tech. Standalone, VST3 and Meta Quest.
A drone-ambient synthesizer for slowly breathing clusters: just intonation, a conductor that plays all night, distance as the one number that shapes every voice, 24 source types, three reverb tiers, and 14,592 presets measured by rendering them. Framework-free C++20 core, JUCE shell. VST3 + standalone.
Berlin School generator: sequenced modular voices and a composer that plays whole pieces and night sets; circuit-modelled filters and VCOs, envelopes, LFOs and a modulation matrix on every synth. C++20 core, JUCE VST3 + standalone, Quest app.
Real-time, audio-reactive kaleidoscope/tunnel music visualizer for Windows and Linux (Qt6/OpenGL 4.3, 830+ GLSL scenes, 3D model import).
Touch-operated MIDI router for a hardware synthesizer rig: scenes, six built-in generators (harmonizer, phrase arpeggiator, three Euclidean sequencers, TB-303 acid) and a dedicated configuration editor. Qt 6, C++17, Windows.
Earlier projects from Clausthal and Bremen. The detailed project pages are still online.
A bounding volume hierarchy built from the inside out using dense sphere packings — proximity and penetration-volume queries at haptic rates (DFG ZA292/1-1, BMBF Avilus).
GPU-assisted, prototype-guided sphere packing for arbitrary objects; yields an approximation of the medial axis as a by-product.
A collaborative multi-user haptic workspace with two-handed interaction and many dynamically simulated rigid objects. Winner of the RTT Emerging Technology Contest 2010.
A standardized, reproducible benchmarking procedure and object set for comparing collision detection libraries.
An open-source, OpenSG-based collision detection pipeline with broad-phase and narrow-phase algorithms (DOP-Tree, BoxTree, …).
Event-based kinetic data structures for updating bounding volume hierarchies under arbitrary deformations.
Simulating a virtual human hand for grasping, pinching and pushing in real time (DFG ZA292/1-1).
A simple cross-platform GLSL editor for teaching: vertex, geometry and fragment shader editors, live uniforms, built-in shapes and OBJ loader. With Markus Kramer.