360° historical re-enactment for Alcoy Town Council

The challenge: To preserve and promote our historical heritage through an immersive visual narrative

To stand out in today’s cultural tourism landscape, Alcoy City Council needed a solution capable of engaging all kinds of audiences, from young people to adults. The main challenge was to design an experience that combined rigorous historical accuracy in recreating Alcoy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with an immersive and interactive narrative that would make visitors feel as though they were really there.

It was also essential to integrate the project into the city itself in an accessible and intuitive way, linking the physical spaces of the historic centre with their representation of the past. The technical challenge required an impeccable level of architectural detail in industrial and urban settings, whilst also ensuring strong local roots by involving the community and local talent in the region in the production process.

Alcoy Town Council

A local government committed to cultural innovation, heritage preservation and the modernisation of its tourism offering

Culture

Lorena Zamorano
Alcoy Councillor for Tourism

It is a way of recovering not only the physical heritage we have in the city, but also the intangible heritage that remains in those conversations and experiences from those times – which, were it not for these new technologies, we would be unable to recover.

The solution: Immersive 360° videos featuring real actors and integration via QR codes

We developed ‘Alcoi: A Journey into the Past’, a pioneering immersive experience comprising 360° videos rendered in the highest quality. The project stands out for its distinctive hybrid production approach: we combine hyper-realistic 3D virtual backgrounds of the historic centre, paper mills, steelworks and traditional markets with the integration of real local actors in period costume, bringing to life milestones such as the match-makers’ demonstration.

To make the experience fully accessible on the streets of Alcoy, we have placed QR codes at strategic locations around key points of interest. By scanning them, users gain access to immersive scenes where they can explore in all directions, experience the ambient sounds and interact with local history first-hand, transforming public spaces into an interactive open-air museum that has been successfully showcased at leading events such as FITUR 2025.

• 3D environments with lighting and spatial sound effects
• Incorporation of characters played by local actors in virtual historical settings
• Deployment of direct access points on public roads for immediate tourist enquiries
• Overarching storylines based on historical events and groups such as the matchgirls or the metalworking industry