Satka Students Recreate Russia’s Oldest Hydropower Plant in Virtual Reality
The project aims to bring back the early 20th-century look of a historic settlement and its industrial site.
Students from an IT Cube center in the Chelyabinsk region are developing a virtual tour of the settlement Porogi, where Russia’s first hydroelectric power plant was built in 1910.
The project’s key feature is that users will not see the modern settlement but its historical appearance from more than a century ago. The virtual environment will include old houses that no longer exist, a ferroalloy plant, and the rapids on the Bolshaya Satka River, which were flooded during the construction of the hydropower plant and disappeared from maps. The facility founded there in 1910 became the country’s first and, until 1931, only ferroalloy producer. The hydropower plant built to support it operated until 2017 and is now a UNESCO heritage site.
Students are working on the project alongside mentors, local historians, and descendants of former residents, who are contributing details about the past. According to the Chelyabinsk region’s Ministry of Digital Development, the virtual tour is expected to be presented by the end of May.
