Abstract: This article discusses the evolution of the study of industrial heritage in domestic and foreign historiography. According to the Nizhny Tagil Charter of the International Committee for the Preservation of Industrial Heritage (TICCIH), industrial heritage means the values of industrial culture that have historical, technological, social, architectural or scientific significance. Despite the fact that industrial heritage has been a topic of study for more than half a century, it is still often overlooked (not included in the register of cultural heritage), which sometimes puts industrial monuments at risk. Interest in industrial heritage is not a momentary trend or a local topic of individuals, but a significant scientific direction for decades, deserving the attention of researchers, the public and the state.
Post-industrial development, characteristic of the XIX century, leads to the completion of the life cycle of a large number of industrial objects, which turn out to be unclaimed due to changes in production processes and, therefore, the loss of their original functions by objects. The question of how the future fate of the former industrial buildings should develop remains open.
Therefore, it becomes important and necessary to collect and comprehend many years of experience in interdisciplinary work in the field of studying and preserving industrial heritage. Attention is also paid to innovations in this field, such as the use of virtual 3D-reconstruction and virtual reality technologies in the study and preservation of industrial monuments, which became possible both due to the rapid development of technologies and a large amount of work carried out by researchers to integrate these technologies into scientific research.

Abstract: The article studies the creation of virtual reality interactive environments as a form of presenting historical 3D-reconstruction results. This approach provides for restoring not only static objects such as architectural appearance and interiors but also dynamic ones. The latter are industrial processes of the past, for instance. The manufacturing building of Tryokhgorny brewery (the biggest in the Russian Empire) was an object for virtual 3D-reconstruction. The article describes the source base and the reconstruction of indoor spaces of the brewery building in the late 19th - early 20th centuries and reconstructs brewing processes as well. The result of the work done is the creation of a virtual reality application with historical sources verification and information tips systems included. The author tests technologies of mechanical animation and particle systems and forms interactive environment logic by means of basic software “Unreal Engine 4” through the visual programming interface “Blueprints”. The virtual environment created lets users take on the role of a brewery worker and make necessary brewing operations in virtual reality.