Bloody Sunday inquiry to use virtual reality technology

Bloody Sunday inquiry to use virtual reality technology

Bloody Sunday judge Lord Saville, who is pioneering ground-breaking technology in his tribunal, has warned of the danger of treating technology as an 'end in itself'.

Lord Saville is heading the Bloody Sunday inquiry into the 1972 shooting by British troops in Londonderry, which killed and wounded protesters demonstrating illegally against internment without trial.

Later this year, he will hear oral evidence at a courtroom in Londonderry using virtual reality technology and real-time transcript recording system LiveNote, time-coded audio recording and intranet to speed up the process.The inquiry is using a state-of-the-art virtual reality system that reconstructs the streets of Londonderry in 1972, and moves from the past to the present by the flick of a switch.

Lord Saville explained to delegates at the recent American Bar Association conference that witnesses use the touchscreen video to walk along the streets and give as accurate an account as possible of where they were, what they saw and what they and others did.He said that speed, expense and access to justice 'are some of the areas where there undoubtedly are shortcomings which do need fixing and where accordingly we should look for newer and better ways of doing things'.

But he warned that 'doing something in a new or different way is not an end in itself...

There is no point in spending time and money on devising new methods of doing things if the end result is not an improvement on what went before.'

Anne Mizzi