During the next decade, the confocal fluorescence microscopy was developed into a technically fully matured state in particular by groups working at the University of Amsterdam and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg and their industry partners. In later years, this technology was adopted widely by biomolecular and biomedical laboratories and remains to this day the gold standard as far as three-dimensional light microscopy with conventional resolution is concerned. The goal of microscopy is in many cases to determine the size of individual, small objects. Conventional fluorescence microscopy can only establish sizes to around the conventional optical resolution limit of approximately 200 nm (lateral). More than 20 years after submitting the 4 pi patent application, Christoph Cremer returned to the problem of the diffraction limit. With the Vertico SMI microscope he could realize his various super resolution techniques including SMI, SPDM, SPDMphymod and LIMON. These methods are mainly used for biomedical applications   Around 1995, he commenced with the development of a light microscopic process, which achieved a substantially improved size resolution of cellular nanostructures stained with a fluorescent marker. This time he employed the principle of wide field microscopy combined with structured laser illumination (spatially modulated illumination, SMI) Currently, a size resolution of 30 – 40 nm (approximately 1/16 – 1/13 of the wavelength used) is being achieved. In addition, this technology is no longer subjected to the speed limitations of the focusing microscopy so that it becomes possible to undertake 3D analyses of whole cells within short observation times (at the moment around a few seconds). Disambiguation SMI: S = spatially, M = Modulated I= Illumination. Also around 1995, Cremer developed and realized new fluorescence based wide field microscopy approaches which had as their goal the improvement of the effective optical resolution (in terms of the smallest detectable distance between two localized objects) down to a fraction of the conventional resolution (spectral precision distance/position determination microscopy, SPDM; Disambiguation SPDM: S = Spectral, P = Precision, D = Distance, M = Microscopy). With this method, it is possible to use conventional, well established and inexpensive fluorescent dyes, standard like GFP, RFP, YFP, Alexa 488, Alexa 568, Alexa 647, Cy2, Cy3, Atto 488 and fluorescein.  in contrast to other localization microscopy technologies that need two laser wavelengths when special photo-switchable/photo-activatable fluorescence molecules are used.