In 2000, Dr. Zachmann received a PhD in computer science, and in 1994 a Dipl.-Inform (MSc), both from Darmstadt University. He worked on his Diploma thesis during a half-year visit to the National enter for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois. He began his studies of computer science at Karlsruhe University.

From 1994 until 2001, he was with the Virtual Reality group at the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics in Darmstadt, where he carried out many industrial projects in the area of virtual prototyping. He also helped found a spin-off (VRCom) that maintains and further develops the VR-System, of which Dr. Zachmann was one of the principal architects during these years. Overall, he was one of the pioneers in Europe who helped develop first Virtual Reality applications for the automotive manufacturing domain.

Dr. Zachmann's research interests include geometric algorithms for computer graphics, in particular collision detection and related topics, virtual prototyping, virtual reality in general, computer vision based hand tracking, immersive visualization, virtual cities, and others.

Zachmann has published many papers at international conferences in areas like collision detection, virtual prototyping, intuitive interaction, mesh processing, and camera-based hand tracking. He has also served on numerous program committees, as a reviewer for journals, conferences, and publishers, as an expert for funding bodies, and as a referee for many PhDs.