Police investigators and forensics specialists face challenging conditions when examining a crime scene. Often, the site of a crime can only be preserved for a short time, particularly if it's in a public area. Investigators must gather as much information as quickly as possible while doing their best not to disturb the scene itself. Also, crime photographers have to shoot scenes from multiple angles while attempting to preserve a sense of scale to ensure the pictures are meaningful -- both to investigators and to a future courtroom.

Crime Scene Image Gallery

A forensics laboratory here is using a sophisticated computer system to reproduce crime scenes.
Image courtesy Silicon Graphics, Inc.
A forensics laboratory here is using a sophisticated computer
system to reproduce crime scenes, recreating everything from
the path of a bullet to the movement of a corpse with
startling realism. See more crime scene images.

Today, some police forces are using virtual reality technology to capture and recreate a crime scene digitally. Several companies have developed numerous methods investigators can use when at the scene of a crime. Some replicate crime scenes with computer graphics similar to what you might find in a virtual reality video game. Other systems assemble photographs into a 360-degree virtual environment just like the photographic walkthroughs you may have seen on hotel and real estate Web sites. Police forces around the world have discovered that, if used properly, virtual environments can help the investigation process from its earliest stages all the way to a courtroom conviction.

Video Gallery: Other Virtual Reality Uses
Hollywood, NVIDIA and model and TV star Adrianne Curry are teaming up to create the world's first real-time, virtual celebrity. See how augmented and virtual reality work in this video from MultiVu.

UC Davis has built a virtual reality cave. Using a radar scanning technique called Lidar, geologists can better measure earthquakes at a distance. See how virtual reality and earthquakes work in this video from UC Davis' NewsWatch.

Duke University Graduate Student Gil Bohrer has created a virtual forest to study how forest canopies interact with the atmosphere. Using three-dimensional rendering technology in the Duke Immersive Virtual Environment (DiVE), Bohrer can display a square kilometer forest within the ten-foot cube DiVE chamber.

Proponents of virtual reality suggested a forensics application for virtual environments in the initial days of the VR media blitz. Back in the '90s, virtual reality was a buzzword found in everything from news reports to Saturday morning cartoons. But as the public discovered that the actual progress in VR technology wasn't quite as advanced as the media seemed to suggest, interest waned and VR became known as a fad. Fortunately, many researchers, developers and computer scientists continued to work in the field, laying the groundwork for useful applications of VR technology.

In this article, we'll look at the two most common approaches using VR technology in crime scene recreation, as well as its advantages and disadvantages. We'll also look at the different stages in an investigation where a virtual crime scene can come in handy.­