Crime scene interpretation through an augmented reality environment

Despite its potential advantages, gesture based interface usage is currently rather limited due to operational and practical issues, while most proposals aim at replacing mouse and keyboard functionalities for medical/surgical applications. This paper presents a crime scene interpretation framework which combines augmented reality visual paradigm and gesture based interaction to provide a new generation of detectives with interactive visualization and manipulation of virtual exhibits while seeing the real environment. The idea is to augment the exploration of the crime scene by means of a see-through head mounted display, exploiting a small set of simple (user-wise) gestures and the visual interface to enable a wider set of commands and functionalities, improving both the efficacy and the accuracy of user-system interaction. The proposed system allow the user to freely position virtual replicas of real object to interactively build visual hypothesis about the crime under investigation, or even to set virtual landmarks which can be used to take distance/angular measurements. All these action can be performed without mouse and keyboard but simply through intuitive gestures. © The Eurographics Association 2011.