The visit to Atapuerca incorporates a 3D virtual trip

The visit to the Atapuerca sites, declared a World Heritage Site, It has been completed with a three-dimensional audiovisual that helps to understand the life of the hominids that lived in the Burgos mountains at different times in human evolution..

The Sierra de Atapuerca has a new incentive, a modern 3D audiovisual installation that allows visitors to travel back in time thanks to a unique stereoscopic installation, which was born with the aim of explaining the behavior of the species that lived in the Burgos mountains. Under the name of 'The Cave of Time', Visitors can choose from four videos with three-dimensional animations, in which to see the environment in which they lived and some of the daily activities of species such as Homo antecessor, H. heidelbergensis, H. sapiens y H.neanderthalensis (Neanderthal man), who also inhabited the Burgos mountains, although it is the only species of which bone remains have not yet been located in the area.

The system has been installed in the so-called Compressor Cave, an old underground quarry that supplied the mining railway that crossed the Sierra de Atapuerca and that now allows the environment of a cave to be reproduced, with high humidity concentration and an almost constant temperature in the environment of the 10 degrees. It is a stereoscopic installation with a 3.60 screen×2 meters in which visitors can also walk, aided by special glasses and from a subjective point, the landscapes of the different eras of the mountains and the interaction of the animals that populated the area in each era, from more than a million years ago to practically the present day.

trip to the past

Unai Extreme, director of Virtualware, the company in charge of the implementation of this system, has pointed out that the work to develop this dissemination tool has been developed for two years in close collaboration between technicians and scientists to create a leading audiovisual system in Europe.. In relation to work, has specified that the Cave of Time is a virtual visit in which a team of 3D modelers, animators and programmers have been working to achieve a “reliable” result based on high-quality technological scenes, which becomes a technological reference in the sector.

For your part, one of the three co-directors of Atapuerca, also director of the Atapuerca Foundation, Eudald Carbonell, has considered that the audiovisual, which is a virtual map that includes animations about everyday activities, landscape and fauna of each era that can be followed in four languages, will improve the understanding of prehistory and evolution. In your opinion, helps spread the importance of the Atapuerca finds, which is a complex of deposits 12 square kilometers with remains of more than 1,5 millions of years of history of human evolution in which the 90 percent of human fossils older than 300.000 years found all over the planet.

The director of the Atapuerca System, Javier Vicente, has considered that the virtual visit is an example of collaboration of the foundation and the entire Atapuerca system together with the private initiative. Besides, has recognized that it comes to fill the gap that had been left when the video that was shown until now in the compressor cave, in the deposits, had been outdated compared to the one that can be seen two years ago in the Museum of Human Evolution.

Those responsible for this virtual tour consider that it is one of the most advanced in the world and the only one in Europe in this type of deposits..