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Please visit the REVEAL home pages for more information
The Advanced Interfaces Group recently conducted a pilot project in collaboration with Greater Manchester Police (GMP). The intention was to discover if Virtual Reality and computer graphics techniques had a role to play in the investigation of crime scenes.
GMP provided us with data for an incident which had been investigated and the case closed. From the data – their draughtman's floor plans, and some of the forensic photographs – we manually recreated the geometry (with some guesswork). We encoded the geometry using the Manchester Scene Description Language (MSDL), and also used SGI's Inventor format, for interactive previewing.
For rendering the model, we used a novel perceptually-based radiosity algorithm developed by Simon Gibson.
The model also contains scans of some of the original forensic photographs, "hung" in the scene at approximately correct camera positions. This permits a comparison between the photographs and the reconstructed scene.
The model is displayed using Maverik, which supports full interactive navigation through the scene in real-time.
Click on the thumbnails below for example images from the scene. Please note that these images are Copyright (c) The University of Manchester and must not be reproduced without express permission.
Following the successful conclusion of the project, the Advanced Interfaces Group received funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, in collaboration with GMP and Harlequin Ltd, for the three-year REVEAL project (April 1998 to March 2001) which is investigating methods for semi-automating the reconstruction process.
The reconstruction project was worked on by all the Advanced Interfaces Group team; and D.I. Dave Heap and Pat Davies from Greater Manchester Police.
For more information, please contact Toby Howard.