In the summer of 2014 I worked on the IC-CRIME Project for the North Carolina State University Liquid Narrative Group as a Digital Games undergraduate research engineer/programmer. IC-CRIME is a revolutionary system that allows collaborative investigations of three dimensional representations of crime scenes. Crime scene investigators and other authorized personnel can collaborate with each other in viewing, exploring, and annotating these virtual crime scene models at any time from any web browser, anywhere in the world. The link to the site can be found on (http://iccrime.ncsu.edu/). My work on IC-CRIME for the summer was based on an extension of the IC-CRIME project which is called IC-CRIME Snapshots. The project started in January of 2014 by three undergraduate students and my work on this project started in May of the same year. I was supervised by NC State PHD Student Julio Bahamón as well as Faculty member Dr. R. Michael Young.
IC-CRIME Snapshots is a game-based training tool that uses procedurally-generated content to provide a standalone 3D virtual environment to train forensic photogrpahers. The system generates crime scenes- interiors of houses an apartments- that contain variations which allow for a unique environment to play through. The player can walk through the scene and photograph objects. The user in the game is graded based on the number of photographs taken, the quality of the photographs taken, whether or not the user contaminates crime scene evidence, and whether or not the user places evidence placards or stickers on evidence items. The user is then able to load previously saved crime scenes and review their grade, review their photographs, review a level heatmap, and review a video simulation replay of the user’s actions during the crime scene.
IC-CRIME Snapshots was built in the Unity 3D Game Engine and was programmed in C# using the .Net Framework. The features in IC-CRIME Snapshots that I implemented:
- The Grading System, specifically involves the contamination rules, the player photograph quality, and the presence of placards for crime scene evidence
- The Placard System
- Several User Interfaces including parts of the main menu, the grading examination screen, the loaded crime scene grade, photos, the in-game menu, the video replay interface, and the Heatmap Interface
- Heatmap Implementation using an asset from the Unity Asset Store
- Plugging in 3D Models for the Crime Scene Procedural Generation
- XML File Generation and Parsing for the user’s Photographs, Grade, Placards, and video replay logging.
- Video Replay’s Avatar Mecanim integration
- Saved player preferences
- Picture Camera Frustum Photo Capturing
- Evidence game object unique cryptic naming and translation system using built regular expression dictionaries
- Created and modified documentation in the developer’s and user’s guide
Below you can see a video that I created in Camtasia Studio of the IC-CRIME Snapshots project. This video was sent to CHI-PLAY (http://chiplay.org/) along with a research paper proposal to be displayed at the conference and was approved on August 8, 2014. The research paper is also attached below.