Using Extended Reality (XR) for crime scene visualization

What we are doing

The project aims to look at different aspects of the visualisations of crime scenes. By understanding the current state of the art with regards to image capture, virtual reality and augmented reality, we are exploring how to translate these technologies into crime scene visualisation in an efficient and accurate way. Investigations into how people interact with visual and other digital information will form the basis of new tools which can develop effective communication and collaboration across the crime scene to court process.

Why we are doing it

We aim to speed up the data accusation from a crime scene while facilitating its ability to be viewed more readily. We hope to gain an understanding of how crime scenes are understood by practitioners across the criminal justice space and help them form more intuitive understandings of the environment. With this we hope to reduce the time required to go from scene capture to viewing and facilitate off site engagement of forensic science practitioners through a virtual portal. We will also be exploring and exploiting opportunities for training, CPD and practitioner development using VR and AR.

How we are doing it

We are undertaking systematic studies in collaboration with crime scene examiners, into how images can be captured, used to create virtual reality representations of the scene and most importantly understand the accuracy of those representations.