Immersive technologies to the service of criminal justice actors – iCrime

Did you know that every year in the EU, around 1,300 new bloody crime scenes and several thousand bloody events are reported? iCrime aims to improve the resolution of bloody homicides and to save a bloody crime scene accurately and permanently. iCrime is a project around the use of immersive technologies from the crime scene to the courtroom. At a crime scene, preserving evidence is critical. The prosecutor, then the examining magistrate and the crime scene investigators have to work together efficiently at the scene. Tools are needed to help them visualize and archive crime scenes. When it comes time to testify at trial, blood trace experts must try to explain their methodology and findings to convince jury members of the reliability of their conclusions. Previously, the best technology that could be introduced at assizes was a passive 3D reconstruction presented on a screen. iCrime brings together experts from the forensic community, magistrates and a pilot court, academics including a leader in immersive technologies.

Our aim is to remove the final scientific hurdles to the eventual production of a virtual simulator of a bloody crime scene. Our aim is to provide all those involved in the criminal justice system with a virtual reality archive of a bloody crime scene, which can be used in both criminal investigations and trials, and which features accurate and reliable physical models.

The three scientific tasks of iCrime, out of a total of four, will help to achieve this objective:

- Modeling of acquired data and automatic detection of blood traces (puddles or drops),
- Development of accurate physical models later integrated into a virtual crime scene simulator,
- Implementation and evaluation of an immersion plateform prototype of bloody crime scene.