Crime Scene Animations For Use w/ Forensics?

Sleen asks: "How common is it to have access to a forensic animator as part of criminal investigation? Drawing likenesses is cool, but what if the event is complex and involves multiple parties? A witness may have a difficult time communicating the circumstances for a linear dialog description of a crime. An animation of the circumstances may be a better vehicle for information bulletins for the investigation. NASA does a very good job of animating in CAD and so forth all the concepts, and its probably expected when submitting grant proposals. Has this technology trickled into criminal investigation?" with all of the computer use in forensic analysis today, I can't see this being a real help except when trying to explain the circumstances behind a crime to those not familiar with intricacies of criminal-investigation. Might something like this proove better off in the courts as a visual aid for the Jury? Would something like this improve how Crime Scenes are investigated?

Comments

Re:The complications of precise forensic animation

[ikekrull]

I doubt that any good animation program (Maya, Softimage, Lightwave, Houdini, 3DS Max) lacks the necessary numerical precision to do all of this stuff. i.e. you can model at pretty much any scale you like, up to the limits of the floating point data types used to express values in the system.

Using the APIs and scripting languages built into all these tools, you can write your own 'precise' kinematic solver that can evaluate the state of any object in the scene to whatever level of precision you have the time to figure out.

You won't be modelling the entire solar system down to the peturbations on the surface of H20 molecules as they interact with each other in the oceans and atmospheres of the planets concerned, but how much precision do you need for a video presentation?

Regardless of this, any animation, especially where it concerns humanoid characters, is basically a huge kludge to get it to 'look right'.

There are no 'physically accurate' simulation packages capable of 'precisely' modelling the motion of a human within an arbitary environment.There is simply no way to collect, archive, analyse and apply the data that a human's behaviour depends on in any situation to a simple mesh (or even a more complex volumetric 'muscle-based') model of a human..

What your asking for is an animator who is skilled enough to be able to work within well-defined technical constraints to produce an animation that closely matches the available data gathered from the crime scene.

And that has nothing to do with the brand on the side of the box of your CAD package, nor much at all to do with the 'numerical precision' said package offers.

There are simply not many people who can do this kind of work well, and there won't be a computer invented in the next twenty years that can come close to doing this type of work.

And when the computer that can do this is invented, then courtrooms, judges and whining lawyers will all have long since been replaced by computers with a small fraction of the processing ability required to do this particular job.

The complications of precise forensic animation

[Marasmus]

My father was a blood spatter analyst for the FDLE (Florida Dept. of Law Enforcement) for some years before becoming the chief forensic investigator for this district's medical examiner's office. I've often tried to help him (since ~1987) try to implement viable visualization tools for crime scenes, courtroom examples, etc. The complications on the technical side are very difficult, but what's most difficult is trying to match the exacting scientific rigor of forensics.

In order to build an accurate animated example, you need a CAD-level rendering engine that will allow you near-perfect specification of distance and relation. Secondly, this rendering engine has to be capable of making 2-D 'snapshots' at different depths on the axis you are intersecting, in order to make a graphical cross-section of the event. This is necessary for all sorts of fun stuff like determining how far an assailant's knife is from the victim at the point when she hits him over the head with a frying pan, etc.. Next, you need isometric 3D-like point of view for mathematically-useful 3D representations. Lastly, you need 1-point, 2-point, and 3-point perspective for the sake of providing clear visuals to the non-mathgeeks in the jury.

Sure, if you're DAMN good with some of the CAD and rendering tools out there, it CAN be done, but the problem is that it can't be done by most, if any, qualified and apt forensic investigators, who need to ensure the scientific accuracy and validity of such renderings.

A number of companies had come to my father and offered tools that were easy-to-use and supposedly mathematically precise. However, these tools ended up being very shoddy walk-through demos at best, and did not allow for any sort of scientifically-reasonable use. Essentially, none of the tools out there were capable of meeting the technical precision required for forensic investication and still be user-friendly enough for a reasonably computer-smart person to build in less than a month's time, just for one scene.

The big boys (FBI, etc) have the money to hire full-time ubergeek engineers to develop engineer-level-accuracy worlds for their displays, but the sort of money and expertise needed just isn't available to the medium-to-large forensic offices (serving 1.5 million people).

I'd love to see such tools, and look forward to playing with them in the future. I had a hell of a lot of fun with AutoCAD and MicroStation all those years ago!

This is already done

[SaxMaster]

The FBI has a unit that already does this. Additionally, a company called Advanced Solutions LLC provides such services. The technology was also used in 1991 to convict Jim Mitchell of killing Artie Mitchell of voluntary manslaughter. (The Mitchell brothers revolutionized the pr0n world by creating the movie Behind the Green Door :-D )

Defense attorneys hate animation

[Troutgirl]

I've seen a few such animated re-creations on TV, but apparently defense attorneys fight them tooth and nail, so they rarely are admitted into evidence. Prejudicial to their clients, ya know. Since they're also not yet cheap to produce, I don't know that acceptance will be fast.

CmdrTaco could do it

[danpbrowning]

CmdrTaco's gerbil animations were great. Maybe he should move into a law inforcement career.

Re:CmdrTaco could do it

[scott1853]

To paraphrase:

Dear CmdrTaco's Butt:

XOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXO

Re:I've turned this work down.

[scott1853]

Good idea turning it down. I would think that following requests like that could get a person into some legal problems.

However, I'd see no problem performing such tasks if it was proposed by the court itself, and not the legal teams. I could see it being used for traffic cases mostly, just because the physics of a car ramming another is more predictable than somebody stabbing another person and running away.

This could also be used in aircraft crash simulations to show how close another aircraft must have been :)

It was done here

[DarkM00N]

HI,

There was a big murder case here in Utah a few years back, the DA used a CGI animation to prove how the acused could have stabed his family, All by herself.

However they did shoot themselves in the foot, if I remember correctly, since the case of the DA was weak beforehand, and after it was put into an animation you could see just how rediculous it was. I think it was something like a normal woman was supossed to have stabed 2 or 3 big guys about 30 times and then herself. In the animation she looked like wonderwoman or something, stabing the guys, avoiding getting hit, the moves were just impossible, even tho the animation showed "how" it could have been possible, but foremost of all it showed how "improbable" it would have been.




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