The visit to Atapuerca incorporates a virtual 3D trip

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

The Sierra de Atapuerca has a new incentive, a modern 3D audiovisual installation that allows visitors to travel to the past thanks to a unique stereoscopic installation, that 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 and H.neanderthalensis (Neanderthal man), that also inhabited the Burgos mountain range, although it is the only species of which no skeletal remains have yet been located in the area.

The system has been installed in the so-called Compressor Cave, an old underground quarry from which the work of the mining railway that crossed the Sierra de Atapuerca was supplied and which now allows to reproduce the atmosphere of a cave, with high concentration of humidity and an almost constant temperature in the environment of the 10 Degrees. It is a stereoscopic installation with a screen of 3.60×2 meters in which visitors can also walk, helped by special glasses and from a subjective point of view, 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.

Journey to the past

Unai Extreme, director of Virtualware, the company in charge of implementing this system, He 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 tour in which a team of 3D modelers, Animators and programmers have been working to achieve a "reliable" result based on scenes of high technological quality, that becomes a technological benchmark in the sector.

For its 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 his opinion, helps spread the importance of Atapuerca's findings, which is a complex of deposits of 12 square kilometers with remains of more than 1,5 million years of history of human evolution in which the 90 percent of human fossils over 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. In addition, He has acknowledged that he comes to cover the gap that had been left when the video that was shown so far in the Compressor Cave, in the fields, had been outdated with respect to the one that can be seen for two years 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 unique in Europe in this type of deposits.

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