After a scene has gone quiet and the yellow tape has cordoned off the incident, how do investigators and forensic experts establish the facts of what happened? How can public safety workers take measurements, photos and data, then turn it into an accurate, objective story? How can they best present these facts in court or to insurance companies?
FARO® Zone 3D Pro and 3D Expert Software is an essential tool for doing this. But there are many things about this powerful software that people, even experienced professionals in the field, don’t realize.
So, here are seven things you probably didn’t know about Zone 3D Pro and 3D Expert Software.
- It’s agnostic toward measurement data.This means that whether you’re taking field measurements with a drone, a 3D laser scanner, a total station or even a tape measure, you can import and combine that data with Zone 3D Software.
- It’s scientifically validated and independently verified. At FARO, we know the importance of being able to say in a court of law that your reports are accurate and have been created using tools that are scientifically accurate. FARO Zone Software has indeed been independently validated in the journal of Science & Justice, in the journal of the Association for Crime Scene Reconstruction and elsewhere.
- It’s the worldwide leading software tool for blood stain pattern analysis and cast-off blood pattern analysis. These two indicators are essential to crime scene investigation. Blood stain pattern analysis is used to determine many things: the possible locations of involved parties, movement before and after bloodshed, potential weapons, to establish a sequence of events and corroborate or refute statements. Furthermore, a cast-off blood pattern is created when blood drops are released from an object in motion — like a swinging knife or bludgeon. In the forensic software market, only FARO Zone can perform cast-off blood pattern analysis — and that’s in addition to providing time-savings and accuracy with its state-of-the-art electronic blood pattern analysis. In summation: FARO Zone Software does the manual labor for you, using electronic “strings” to save hours of time, plus preventing human error due to fatigue.
- Create compelling deliverables — from video animations to virtual reality. Did you know you can create powerful, shareable deliverables in FARO Zone? By using something as simple and commonplace as a photograph, you can make animations, generate measurement reports, create report diagrams, do time distance studies, perform skid analysis and more. Your animations will take the viewer to the scene of the crime, as you animate cars, headlights, human bodies, bullets and all types of weather. In addition, FARO Zone 3D Expert Software is the only tool of its kind that makes it easy for instructors to create their own virtual reality crime scene training scenarios.
- Recent updates to Zone include improved performance speeds, which help Zone run up to 50% faster and take up 30% less space on your hard drive, plus the ability to convert drone imagery and 2D photos to point cloud data in 3D Expert and the capability to import point cloud data in 3D Pro.
- FARO Zone’s reports provide a proof of your work. Just like with a math proof, where you must lay out each step you took to get to the solution, the final reports that Zone creates provide a detailed proof of the crime and crash scene analyses you perform. This allows you to share the reports with confidence and clarity to third parties for objective analysis. The data will be there, laid out clearly and in an organized fashion.
- FARO Zone is the only software of its kind to offer such an accurate, comprehensive suite of bullet trajectory features. And this capability is essential to determining the possible location of shooters and victims, establishing a sequence of events, and corroborating or refuting statements. With FARO Zone’s bullet trajectory analysis, you can attach a bullet trajectory to a body, then stand the figure up to match the victim’s position in the scene. Following this, you can apply markers to show the path of a bullet through multiple surfaces — plus generate a detailed report with one click.
Public safety professionals across the world rely on FARO solutions to make accurate decisions faster. Download a trial and sample data sets today to experiment with this revolutionary software — and please get in touch if you’d like to learn more.