In the real world, the ratio between full brightness of the sun and complete darkness is in therange of 2.000.000.000:1. But today projection display technology is limited to contrast ratios inthe order of 10.000:1. This hinders a convincing simulation and presentation of lighting effectsin professional markets such as car styling, architecture and industrial design.What is missing today are interactive visualisation systems that fully support high dynamic rangematerial and light information from the acquisition stage through the processing stage to thedisplay stage.The aim of MAXIMUS is to develop the first system to fully support high dynamic range information throughout the pipeline. Starting with high dynamic range material and light acquisition, providing a high dynamic range real-time light simulation and rendering pipeline and finally displaying maximum fidelity image quality with color gamut enhanced stereoscopic high dynamic range projection technology to bring the total dynamic range to over 5.000.000:1 – a real breakthrough in display technology. Natural gadget-free multi-modal interaction techniques will allow multiple users to easily interact with virtual objects, virtual light sources and materials to compose and configure scenes and evaluate lighting effect rendered in real-time. The system will be evaluated in the professional markets of car styling, architecture and industrial design.The MAXIMUS high fidelity and high dynamic range visualisation system will allow professionalsand non-experts (due to its ease-of-use) to evaluate and experience virtual lighting effectsconvincingly for the first time, thus overcoming many of the acceptance problems ofvisualisation systems today.