Asturias Inmersivo | Virtual Reality experiences for Asturian heritage

A journey into Asturias' past in virtual reality

Asturias is home to mine shafts and headframes, coal ports and caves with rock art. But it also hides a past that is hard to imagine from the outside: that of the miners who went down in the dark, and of the trains loaded with coal bound for the sea.

Within the Asturias Inmersivo platform, we created four virtual reality experiences to live that past first-hand, from anywhere.

Going down the mine like a miner

A miner accompanies the user and tells the story. Before going down, the user picks up their numbered tag, just as miners did to keep track of who was inside.

They then walk through the mine with only the light of their lamp, which turns blue as a firedamp warning. In this way, they discover how hard manual work was, at the height of coal mining in the mid-20th century.

From coal to steel and the sea

Guided by a miner, the user goes down the mine and extracts the coal with their own hands. The route continues to the steelworks, where the coal becomes steel, and ends at the shipyard, where they see how that material ends up as part of a ship's hull.

In another experience, the user boards the train at the hoppers, true makeshift stops, and experiences the journey through the valley first-hand: the first stretch of the coal route to the coast. A complete industrial chain, from the mine to the steel industry and shipbuilding, that transformed the landscape, the economy and the life of an entire region.

Cueva de la Peña: a leap into prehistory

The user explores the cave, recreated from a real scan provided by the client. They move from painting to painting and stop at each one to learn its story: what it meant, or what it is believed to have meant.

It is a place so protected that it only admits groups of ten people at most, and only with a prior booking. Here, VR replaces the visit and makes it possible to reach the cave from any fair or museum.

A heritage that travels beyond Asturias

The result was a set of four virtual reality experiences, delivered on 17 PICO 4 Ultra headsets and available in Spanish, English and French. They were ready to be deployed at tourism fairs and touring events.

Mining, the steel industry, the railway and prehistory came together in a single immersive story, from the shafts to the coal ports and from the factories to the caves. As a result, Asturian heritage could be visited from a fair or a museum, even where real access is limited, as in the Cueva de la Peña.

These experiences are complemented by a web platform with augmented reality and 360 tours, which we describe in this other project.