In January, four academics from the Department of Criminal Justice and Forensic Science, Dean Northfield, Neil Lamont, Rachel Bolton-King and David Flatman-Fairs successfully completed Advanced Laser Imaging’s 2 day course in virtual reconstruction. After learning about the theory of laser scanning and its application to casework examples, we used the Faro 3D laser scanner to collect accurate data of the University’s Crime Scene House where a shooting incident had occurred. Our first challenge was to ensure that all areas of the house were captured and that no ‘black holes’ existed in our dataset!

To construct our virtual scene, we uploaded and successfully joined together (registered) all individual scan datasets, creating a colour 3D point cloud. Using the software we explored all areas of the house, annotating evidence, measuring objects of interest and creating a navigational journey through the scene, which could be presented to the jury. We were relieved to find that no important areas of our crime scene had been missed!

Using case examples we identified co-ordinate locations of any bullet holes within 3D point clouds for various crime scenes. We constructed accurate 3D models of bullet trajectories and were able to apply these into virtual scenes to establish the location of the firearm at the time of each shooting. To present such models in court, we created a video animation to seamlessly travel through the reconstructed scene, viewing objects at appropriate angles using motions such as dollys, orbits, trucks and pans.

This hands-on course was very interesting and engaging, developing valuable skills for application to both our research and teaching; we are now eager to put them into practice!