Another cool project that we have just completed is again a historical reconstruction. This time we have built the entire simulation of an early Neolithic village called La Draga. The project has been funded by one of the major Spanish banks, La Caixa.
This time we worked very close with archaeologists who excavated the Draga site. It was an interesting, fun and passionate process. The first stage of the project was reconstructing the virtual environment. After completed this stage archeologists took a break, published a couple of articles about La Draga with illustrations from our simulation and then arranged a few museum exhibitions throughout Spain, the major of which was at the Archaeological Museum of Catalonia.
Next stage was populating the simulated environments with avatars. This step took a pretty long time, as archeologists had the aim of building one of the most accurate historical reconstructions ever created. They spent months assembling and sorting excavated artefacts, creating personas around those and then drawing detailed pictures of each of the avatars together with concept artists. By that time the funding has ran out, so avatars had to be created by some talented design students from the University of Barcelona. After months and months of discussions and revisions all 35 avatars were finally created.
Our final touch at ArtOn Lab was to polish the avatars a little bit, animate them and place them in the environment. You can see the end result in the above video. Hopefully soon Virtual La Draga will be available in a historical or archaeological museum near you.