Professor Alan Chalmers has been awarded a prestigious Tartessos Award from the Spanish Society of Virtual Archaeology for his ‘pioneering work and life-long contribution to the field of Digital Cultural Heritage’.

The Spanish Society of Virtual Archaeology is a non-profit scientific association with the aim of combining all professionals from different disciplinary areas related to archaeology, cultural heritage and new technologies.

Professor Chalmers was presented with the award at the Digital Heritage 2015 international conference in Grenada last year.

The award gets its name from Tartessos, a semi-mythical harbor city and the surrounding culture on the south coast of the Iberian Peninsula (in modern Andalusia, Spain), at the mouth of the Guadalquivir River. The Tartessians were rich in metal. The inspiration behind the award sculpture comes from the Treasure of El Carambolo found in El Carambolo, Spain, 3 kilometers west of Seville, on 30 September 1958. It was the discovery of this treasure hoard that spurred interest in the Tartessos culture.

Professor Chalmers is Professor of Visualisation and Royal Society Industrial Fellow at WMG, University of Warwick. His research focuses on high-fidelity virtual environments, HDR imaging, multi-sensory perception, parallel processing and virtual archaeology. In particular, his visualisation team, is working to create “Real Virtuality”: authentic virtual experiences, which provide the same perceptual response from participants as if they were actually present, or “there” in the real scene being portrayed. A human's perception of the real world is more than just what we see, and thus real virtuality needs to include visual, aural, smell, touch and even taste, to achieve the appropriate level of perceptual realism.