The study is exploring the use of virtual reality headsets to ‘transport’ jury members to relevant crime scenes. While the costs associated with physically transporting juries to visit crime scenes can be steep, Staffordshire Police have described the alternative being explored by associate professor Dr Caroline Sturdy Colls and her team at Stafforshire University as an affordable alternative, with the re-usable VR headsets costing around £700 each. The project has received £140,000 worth of funding from the European Commission and is believed to be the first study of its kind in Europe.

Seeing clearly

‘Traditional means of documenting, sketching and photographing crime scenes can be laborious and they don’t provide data suitable for presentation in court to non-experts,’ said Dr Colls to Legal Cheek. ‘A number of novel, digital, non-invasive methods [have the] potential to ... permit access to difficult and/or dangerous environments, create a more accurate record of buried or concealed evidence and provide more effective means of presenting evidence in court,' she added in a statement to the Wall Street Journal.