June 11, 2025

Collaborating with a nonprofit, engineering and arts students use virtual reality to transport visitors to the Byrd Park utility’s heyday.

On a hot, humid day in May, three people stand in the cool, damp pump room of Richmond’s Pump House in Byrd Park. In front of them, pistons crank and turbines spin, generating electricity and pumping water into the city.

But the pumps aren’t really there – in fact, they haven’t worked in this space for over a century. Instead, the visitors, each wearing a pair of chunky white goggles, are seeing a virtual reality version of the Pump House when it was operational in the early 20th century.

Mac Wood, a 2019 graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University and the secretary of Friends of Pump House, helps guide the visitors through the VR tour of the building, which is perched between two canals above the James River.

“If you’re facing the pumps to your right, there’s a staircase,” Wood says, as the visitors use small joysticks to navigate through the space, without actually moving themselves. “And that will take you up into the ballroom.”

The Pump House, which once served as a dual-purpose utility building and event space, is currently undergoing restoration by Friends of Pump House. The volunteer nonprofit is working to get the building, which was built in 1883 and closed in 1924, back into use as a part of the James River Park System.

In addition to restoring the building, the group is bringing the past alive through a years-long collaboration with VCU.

Since 2021, Friends of Pump House has collaborated with VCU students in the College of Engineering and the School of the Arts to model and animate the interior of the building, including its machinery. Now, visitors can experience the Gothic Revival building during its prime through the VR program, watching the building operate as though it were a century ago.

“It’s a cornerstone of Richmond’s history,” Wood said of the Pump House. “It’s kind of a perfect metaphor for 19th- and 20th-century Richmond.”

Both the physical and VR tours begin in the old boiler room, which provided steam for a steam engine and heated the water pipes in the winter. In the next room, that steam engine drove a hydroelectric generator, which powered the building and a pump at the Byrd Park reservoir.

And in the final, cavernous room on the first floor, water from a canal turned three turbines that pumped a combined 12 million gallons of drinking water each day into the reservoir. The building also includes a ballroom on the second floor, open on one side to catch the river breeze.

The nonprofit’s collaboration with VCU began when a College of Engineering capstone team worked with Friends of Pump House to model and animate the pumps, in addition to conducting archival work to discover what machinery was actually in the building between 1905 and its closing in 1924.

“This has not only been a project to create a VR app, but a dig into archival records and a real historic endeavor,” Wood said. “A lot of documents and information about Richmond’s engineering history were uncovered in the creation of this VR app. So it’s the app and the visual for people who are doing the tours, but it’s also preserving and uncovering history.”

The next year’s engineering capstone group worked to model the Pump House’s generators and steam engine, also using historical newspaper clippings and sketches, while students in the Class of 2024 helped to develop the VR app using a program called Unity. This year’s class took that first draft of the app and worked with Friends of Pump House to turn it into the working VR model used on tours today.

“It was very exciting,” said Zemas Zeamanuel, a 2025 computer science graduate who was on this year’s capstone team. “This was my first project where I was able to work on something that was actually going to be used in the real world.”

In addition to engaging students from the departments of mechanical and nuclear engineering and computer science, the project has also spanned multiple VCU schools. Maddy Aykens, who graduated this year from VCUarts, translated her experience modeling people and other organic objects into modeling the Pump House’s boilers, generators and electric switchboards.

“What’s interesting about this project is that it was actually kind of out of my comfort zone, because I’m used to making 3D characters and 3D character art,” said Aykens, a communications arts major who is looking to break into the video game industry.

The VR tour isn’t VCU’s only collaboration with Friends of Pump House. Another group of engineering students worked with local high school students from CodeRVA to model the Pump House using a Fortnite-based game creation software. Both experiences have given VCU students, as well as students from CodeRVA, the chance to learn how to work in teams and how to work professionally with a real-world client.

“The Pump House is such a treasure,” said John Leonard, Ph.D., a VCU computer science professor and the faculty advisor to over 20 students who have worked on the VR project since 2021. “It offers our students the perfect focal point for sharing their newly acquired skills and expertise with the community.”

And though Friends of Pump House has made significant progress toward restoring the building, it is far from ready to host events again. Most of the structure is currently being renovated, and visitors are required to wear hard hats.

Leonard hopes the VCU collaborations could propel the organization’s full restoration of the building.

“The Pump House, to me, is Richmond,” he said. “It’s the James River, it’s history, it’s people.”

Tours of the Pump House typically occur once per month from March to November. Visit the Friends of Pump House website to learn more.