Welcome to the ZEISS Symposium

The Symposium in Oberkochen networked international scientists and leading representatives from industry. Meeting in the ZEISS Forum, the Symposium participants not only presented the current state of technology, but also identified and worked out where there is need for action in strategic research fields in the coming years. As future-oriented technologies, optics and photonics shape our society, science and culture.

Other new important areas include communications, sensors, illumination and medical technology. Digitization enables the manufacture of microchips with ever-smaller structures and therefore more computing power with increasingly small dimensions. Another exciting field of innovation is immersive microscopy with the newly available VR/AR scenarios for digitized Big Data visualizations using VR headsets, data gloves and other devices. The Symposium served as a blueprint for the digital world of tomorrow, actively advancing light technologies.

Optics in the digital world is going to change how we gather, process and visualize information. The transformation has just begun, driven by a strong interaction of digital and optical technologies. While optical imaging is a key technology for data generation subject to digital evaluation, it is simultaneously affected and changed by powerful image processing techniques in the field of computational optics.

Cloud technology enables information extraction, visualization, pre-processing and transmission of large and many data sets from instruments and provides platforms for sharing and processing of data from space-time distributed inputs. Visualization systems for augmented (AR) and virtual (VR) reality are currently undergoing fierce development, with applications just emerging.