Welcome to our 2016 Senior Project Page
For our project we created a virtual, interactive crime scene that uses the CAVE for the Computer Science Elective Digital Forensics course at Villanova University.
Check out our video here:
Introduction
- Digital Forensics is one of the most popular CS electives.
- Students are taught how to retrieve digital evidence and are offered a trip to an FBI laboratory.
- Our team wished to simulate a crime scene which students could visit as well.
- Our goal is to supply students with an interactive environment in which they may practically apply what they have learned.
Background
- Meeting with Dr. Klassner and Prof. Price allowed us to plan our resources and vision.
- Dr. Klassner suggested the use of Vizard to design our digital environment and TurboSquid to buy digital models of “evidence” to be hidden.
- Accordingly, Dr. Price provided our team with a list of evidence that he would like to see included in the crime scenes.
- Our crime scenes would be explored by student groups of four or five at a time.
Methodology
- Digital models were acquired from the TurboSquid and CGTrader websites:
- The apartment environment was provided, as it is the default environment used to demonstrate Villanova’s CAVE.
- Once the models were bought, the apartment was populated using the models as articles of “evidence.”
- Textures were added and manipulated to differentiate models from each other.
- Three different crime scenes were constructed, one of which is randomly selected for a given team to explore.
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Results
- The apartment environment can be explored using the CAVE:
- Our team was pleased to find that our drawer animations blended seamlessly within the CAVE environment.
- We achieved general interaction capabilities with most of the objects within the apartment environment.
Conclusion
- Our team hopes that what we have created will be a valuable, interactive teaching resource for Digital Forensics courses in the future.
- We also hope that the demonstration of our crime scene environment will encourage other students to work with Villanova’s CAVE and build their own projects using it as a resource in the future.
References
Authors and Contributors
Brendan McCann, Robert Serritella, and Zach Zaccaro