Stonehenge App made in Huddersfield

One of the world’s most iconic prehistoric monuments has inspired an iPhone app by a Huddersfield expert.

Stonehenge attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors from across the world every year– particularly for the summer and winter solstices. And now people can explore the history of the site from the comfort of their armchair, with help from the University of Huddersfield

Dr Rupert Till has created “The Stonehenge Experience” – a downloadable app, which employs advanced digital modelling techniques so that users can see what the site would have looked like in the dark and mysterious days of prehistory.

Users of the app can navigate interactively around Stonehenge and explore it without seeing any latter-day fences or paths – or crowds of tourists.

It is possible to “fly” over the top of the site, or zoom towards it and see how Stonehenge developed over the years, and how different arrangements of the stones were set up.

App users can also “listen” to Stonehenge via headphones, and experience the echoes from its surfaces.

A computer model of Stonehenge was originally created by Dr Till, a music lecturer and researcher in order to carry out acoustic analysis of the site.

Then his colleagues Dr Ertu Unver and Andrew Taylor, experts in 3-D modelling and design, produced a super-accurate model and multimedia files that reconstructed Stonehenge virtually.

Commercial software company Ribui approached the University team with a plan to develop the model into an interactive iPhone app and now “The Stonehenge Experience” has been released to the public, just in time for Winter Solstice 2011.

Dr Till said: “The use of digital interactive tools in this way allows anybody, anywhere in the world to connect with the thousands of years of tradition of journeying to Stonehenge, especially on the Winter Solstice.

“The trouble is, it is often not possible to watch the sun setting from inside Stonehenge. It is often cloudy and there are thousands of people all trying to get inside the stone circle at sunset.

“Also, half the stones at Stonehenge are missing or fallen, compared to the prehistoric version of the site.”

The Stonehenge Experience app can be downloaded from itunes price £1.99