Virtual reality (VR) headphones could soon help jurors gather a crime scene during a court trial by transporting them to the scene of the car accident or murder.
An investigation by the University of South Australia (UniSA) has unveiled a system that simulates the crime scene using laser scans, allowing jurors to move around the area and see specific evidence related to the crime.
To test the innovation, the team showed a group of fake jurors photographs of the crime scene and another used 3D headphones to investigate the same site.
Study participants who saw a fatal traffic accident through a 3D headset were 86.67% more chosen the same verdict, which was death for dangerous driving, while the other group split 47/53 percent between a careless driving verdict and a dangerous driving verdict.
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Virtual reality (VR) headphones could soon help jurors gather a crime scene during a court hearing by transporting them to the scene of the car accident or murder
Dr Andrew Cunningham, of the Australian Research Center for Interactive and Virtual Environments at UniSA, said in a statement: “Participants who were immersed in the scene were more likely to correctly remember the location of the car in relation to the victim at the time of the accident, while it was difficult for people to visualize the scene from still images.
“This provides unequivocal evidence that interactive technology leads to fairer and more consistent verdicts and, in fact, could be the future of courtrooms.”
During the study, the team showed a group an initial condition that included a slide show of 32 images, 14 of which were a reconstruction of the crime scene and the rest were of the actual fact and of the evidence
The other group experienced the virtual reality condition, which allowed users to “navigate space by walking or using a standard teleportation method,” according to the study published in the Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems .
To test the innovation, the team showed a group of fake jurors photographs of the crime scene and another used 3D headphones to investigate the same fatal car accident.
Users can also see through different viewpoints, including drivers and eyewitnesses who saw the crash
There are “hot spots” all over the digital world showing test photos found in the actual car crash.
Users can also see through different viewpoints, including drivers and eyewitnesses who saw the crash.
“Virtual reality also required significantly less effort than using photographs to link the sequence of events,” Cunningham said.
Lead researcher Dr. Carolin Reichherzer said site visits remain the gold standard for providing jurors with a realistic impression of a scene, but they also have their drawbacks. “They’re expensive, especially in remote places, and in some cases the place has changed, making accurate visualization impossible,” Dr. Reichherzer said.
There are “hot spots” all over the digital world showing test photos found in the actual car crash
During the study, the team showed the group an initial condition that included a slide show of 32 images, 14 of which were a reconstruction of the crime scene and some were from the actual event.
While Australian researchers continue to work on their innovation, the technology has been used during a real court hearing.
In 2018, a No. 1 intermediate people’s court in Beijing became China’s first court to introduce virtual reality during a criminal case, VR Scout reports.
HTC Vive headphones were used to carry the only witness to a murder at the scene in hopes of helping them remember specific facts.
According to the Chinese publication Legal Daily, the murder case involved a suspect named Zhang, 30, accused of murdering his girlfriend, Liu, 19.
Zhang allegedly stabbed his girlfriend on September 13, 2017 after cutting himself three times with a knife.
The witness, named in court as Mou Dong, used the headphones in the center of the track, but fell back into the horrible scene that was also played on a projector. for the jurors, the judge, and the lawyers to see.
“I was behind Liu at the time. Zhang was asking Liu something. And then he started getting hurt,” said Dong, the victim’s partner, as he used the Vive drivers to explore the environment. simulated.