As well as some of the standard includes delivered with POV-Ray, I also used the pseudo-HDRI lighting include developed by Jaime Vives Piqueres. You can download this from his site. None of the parameters in the pHDRI include file were modified.

Nothing much really to say in terms of textures. The manipulator, that's the robot, uses 3 different types of metal textures and nice shiny black plastic. The pyramid and the table, both use the same glass material - it has very nice properties!

The dominating object in the scene is the manipulator. This is a modified version of the manipulator used in the 'Dissolution' scene - which you can download yourself. It looked fantastic in the Dissolution image and I think works well in this scene - was a bitch to position though! The pyramid was created, not surprisingly, from a number spheres. I created a small macro to be able to create a layer at a time - saved me a lot of time!  The table was merely a cylinder with a texture applied.

The key element in the scene, which really adds the realism, is the lighting. Depending on the technique this is either an image for pseudo-HDRI sphere or a .hdr image for HDRI. In the pHDRI case, i used the Office 3 image. This, along with some others, can be found on the ignorancia site.