A project at Staffordshire University has shown that virtual reality (VR) could be effectively used to recreate crime scenes in court, particularly to present juries with a more immersive reconstruction of the events under discussion.
The project combines a range of technologies, including virtual reality headsets, and drones for recording footage of crime scenes, to provide both lawyers and juries with more detailed and comprehensive presentations of evidence.
The use of virtual reality may improve jurors' spatial understanding of the evidence being presented, and eliminate the potential misunderstandings wrought in the process of mentally piecing together multiple pieces of evidence, for example security camera footage, photographs, and eyewitness accounts.
In a blog post for The Huffington Post, Christopher Markou, a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge's Faculty of Law, suggests that VR reconstructions of past events could also be used to refresh witnesses' memories of particular details of what they saw.
At present, 3D reconstructions of events - although not viewed via VR devices - are sometimes used to present evidence in court.
VR-style reconstructions of crimes have also been pieced together using evidence presented in courtrooms. In 2015, Emblematic Group published a VR-style video reconstruction, pieced together using criminal trial evidence, of the 2012 killing of US teenager Trayvon Martin by neighbourhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman. The reconstruction was presented as an "immersive journalism" piece after Zimmerman had been acquitted of the murder charges against him.
Yet Markou notes that to implement VR in courtrooms, rules pertaining to the use of evidence would need to be adapted to accommodate the new technology, and "VR experts would need to be created to validate a rendering".
He also warns that it is important that VR should be firmly understood, especially by the jury, in a courtroom context to demonstrate a version of the truth, rather than "recreate objective reality". Judges would need to make decisions about the admissibility of VR evidence, especially to prevent lawyers from presenting "manipulative recreations" in court, he puts forward.
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