Lawyers, judges and jurors could soon explore crime scenes in three dimensions in the courtroom, in the same way that video gamers explore virtual worlds.

Software called instant Scene Modeler (iSM) re-creates an interactive 3D model from a few hundred frames of a scene captured by two ordinary video cameras aligned at a set distance from each other. Users can zoom in on any object in the 3D model, measure distances between objects and look at scenes from different angles.

iSM uses a set of algorithms called SIFT, which very quickly identifies common features in sequential images, allowing separate 3D images to be transformed into a virtual 3D world that can be rendered by a graphics gaming card inside an ordinary laptop or PC.