All posts by RSkelton

Virtual Reality & Crime Scenes

Immersing the jury in the scene, in 3D, can only enhance their understanding of what went down. While transporting jury members to the actual crime scene might be expensive, difficult or even impossible (arson) – a 3D recreation might be affordable and achievable in the future.

Once again I quote Infinite Reality ( by Jim Blascovich and Jeremy Bailenson), this time from page 202:

Lawyers and judges can also use virtual reality to enable jury members to experience a crime or accident scene “firsthand.” Unlike a two-dimensional map, chart, or another audiovisual aid, such as a photograph, jurors can enter a re-creation in virtual reality. Jurors can experience the visual perspective of any person who was actually at the scene. Furthermore, they can move around and experience the environment from any point of view. We have worked with the Federal Judicial Center to help them use virtual reality to study how reconstructing crime scenes digitally can improve eyewitness identification via “police lineups.” Compared to witnesses looking at suspects’ photographs, which is how 151 approximately 75 percent of police lineups occur in the United States, a virtual sequence of suspects embedded in a re-creation of the crime scene itself can improve eyewitness accuracy. A witness wearing a head-mounted display and walking among the avatars can see them from novel angles. Moreover, she is able to get extremely close to their heads and faces—something actual witnesses are not only prevented from doing but are often afraid to do. If the crime occurred in a liquor store, the witness could view the lineup in a virtual re-creation of the liquor store without ever having to physically return to the scene of the crime. This is particularly useful for witnesses who would be traumatized by a return to the actual crime scene, or when the crime scene no longer exists (as is often the case with arson, for instance).

Second Life

Second Life had many problems:

  • ahead of its time, like Apple’s Newton
  • allowed anarchy
  • porn and gambling reigned
  • it played like Monopoly

It was big for quite a while, and could’ve been the next thing. Jim Blascovich and Jeremy Bailenson in their book Infinite Reality say this:

“But even Second Life does not represent the ultimate example of social networking addiction. Instead of using a keyboard, joystick, Wii, Move, or Kinect-based device to navigate a future version of Second Life or Facebook, imagine donning a headset and beaming yourself into a 3-D immersive social-networking site, meeting people, building a home, going to clubs, engaging in almost every activity known in grounded reality. If avatar movements are generated by one’s corresponding physical movements, and if one’s perceptions are expanded beyond sights and sounds to also include touches and smells, then one’s “second” life will be a whole lot more like their “first” one. Given that everyone’s movements can be tracked, rendered, saved, and replayed in virtual reality, one can relive an experience or even “change the past.” Had a great virtual tryst? Play it again. Interrupted? Pause and continue later.”

That was 4-years ago, but spot on for now – Second Life is the future, it just needs to be more immersive and more relevant.

Uncanny Valley

Avatars and robots, if they are intended to look like humans, need to be highly accurate or not accurate at all. In-between invokes uncanny valley, a creepy space where things aren’t quite right:

uncanny_graph_blog

So you either make the avatar/robot look clearly non-human, or you nail it. In-between just doesn’t work.

That is why, in Map Merge, we go for photo-realism in avatars. Sure, you have the ability to make some adjustments, but the end result needs to be 100% realistic. 95% realistic turns out to be a fail…

 

The Drone Manufacturers

A fundamental aspect of MapMerge is that the drones and droids will  be tracked. Without a doubt regulatory authorities and drone manufacturers will need to be involved. While manufacturers could be forced to comply via legislation, the ideal is for their involvement to be voluntary.

Voluntary is already occurring when it comes to restricting drones from flying over sensitive locations, for example the No Fly Zones of DJI.

There are a number of services that aim to make it easier to operate drones commercially – like AirMap – although it seems they are only trying to abide by current regulations, rather than being a progressive, aggressive solution.

The answer is a controlling system that provides so many benefits (navigation, security, integrity, authenticity) that manufacturers will be clamouring to be part of it.