In "Virtual becomes reality at Stanford," the San Francisco Chronicle looks at several projects using virtual reality to study how digital technologies can transformed human social interactions. One of these projects is a virtual police lineup where witnesses can view the suspects from any angle and in a virtual environment similar to where the crime has happened. The lineup suspects can also have virtually the same weight or height, and even very similar clothing or hair styles. Even if the experiments done with students on eyewitness testimony are successful, it will not arrive to police stations before more studies are done.
The projects described by the Chronicle are led by Jeremy Bailenson, an assistant professor and director of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL) at Stanford
But why use immersive virtual reality for studying police lineups? For several reasons. For example, you can see below that virtual lineups can occur in the sensory context of the crime (Credit:VHIL).
And the eyewitnesses can view the suspects from any angle (Credit:VHIL). These two images were extracted from a VHIL flyer about the project (Microsoft Word format, 1 page, 278 KB)
Let's return to the Chronicle for a few more details about the technology used for this project, which involves a $25,000 helmet, two computers and 4 cameras.
[Bailenson's] high-tech helmet can transport victims to a real-seeming police station where five virtual suspects walk into a white room. As in real police lineups, they resemble each other but not enough to be indistinguishable. With a tap on Bailenson's keyboard, the suspects are suddenly the same weight, dressed in khakis and sporting identical buzz cuts. Now the victim can't pick the one person -- perhaps the wrong person -- who has, say, the long hair she remembers from the crime scene.
If a victim recalls looking up at her mugger in a brick alley, Bailenson can make the suspects taller and suddenly turn the virtual world into that alley. "In virtual reality, you get unlimited information -- you can see someone's face from any distance and any angle," he said. "When you give them unlimited information they can use, they're more likely to be accurate."
The VHIL Projects page provides other details (at the bottom).
We believe that conducting lineups using three-dimensional, digital busts of heads and bodies offers a number of advantages: witnesses can view the suspects and distracters from any angle (not just front and profile), witnesses can move as close or as far from the suspects as they desire, test administrators can use mathematical models to distance the distracters from the actual suspects by simply morphing the underlying mesh model of the suspect, the lineup can occur within the virtual crime scene (i.e. the suspects and foils can lineup in the context of the actual crime, and finally, the virtual suspects and distracters can be animated, not just static.
This project is conducted in collaboration with the Research Center for Virtual Environments and Behavior (ReCVEB) of the University of California at Santa Barbara headed by psychology Professor James Blascovich Here is a link to the Eye Witness Testimony page at UC San Barbara.
And please read the SF Chronicle article for details about other research projects using virtual reality at Stanford University.
Sources: Carrie Sturrock, The San Francisco Chronicle, April 29, 2007; and various websites
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