Crédits photos : © Prisma Laval Virtual
Winner of the Enterprise & Productivity category at the Laval Virtual Awards 2026, the JANUS software, developed by the Institut de Recherche Criminelle de la Gendarmerie Nationale, took home the prize awarded on 9 April at the Espace Mayenne. Held in Laval for 28 years, Europe’s largest XR event recognises the most promising XR projects each year across a range of categories. The Enterprise & Productivity category honours XR applications that concretely transform the way organisations work.
Crime and accident scenes are today captured with remarkable technical precision: laser scanners, terrestrial or aerial photogrammetry, LiDAR sensors, GNSS systems. The problem is no longer the quality of the capture, but its exploitation. These tools generate massive volumes of heterogeneous data that are difficult to interpret for magistrates, lawyers or jurors who, by definition, have no physical access to the scene.
From laser scanner to digital twin
It was this observation that gave rise to JANUS, a project initiated two years ago by a gendarmerie officer and developed entirely in-house by a team of four engineers at the Institut de Recherche Criminelle de la Gendarmerie Nationale (IRCGN). On stage, the project was presented by its lead, who was keen to acknowledge what this prize represents for the technical forces of the gendarmerie. “Our institute is here to bring scientific evidence to criminal facts. The project started from a field need: to transform digitised data into an interactive digital twin.”
The software centralises, within a single spatial reference frame, all the data from a scene (captures, analyses, evidence, documents), reducing information fragmentation. The same environment can be consulted on a computer, tablet or smartphone, or explored in immersion via a VR headset, depending on each user’s needs.
The challenge is not only technical. “A crime scene is something visible. The people who judge a criminal act are selected by lot — they are members of the public. There is a need to visualise the scene in order to properly understand what happened,” explains the project lead. JANUS allows jurors and magistrates to be brought closer to the scene of the events, without physical travel, in the interest of judicial accuracy.
Reviving traumatic memory to surface the truth
Beyond magistrates, lawyers and jurors, the tool is also used in judicial reconstructions involving suspects themselves. Some, marked by a traumatic event, are no longer able to clearly explain what happened. Placed back into the reconstructed 3D environment, they can sometimes recover buried memories and present them to the court. Advanced features such as camera-matching also allow video feeds to be integrated directly into the 3D environment, facilitating the comparison of hypotheses and the chronological reconstruction of events.
JANUS also addresses very practical constraints: the impossibility of physical judicial reconstructions in certain cases, security concerns, coordination of multiple parties, tight judicial timelines. The solution allows teams to work remotely, reduce travel and optimise resources, while securing data exchanges.
Developed 100% in-house by the IRCGN team, without reliance on external providers for the code, JANUS is presented as a fully sovereign solution. Integrated since 1 September 2025 into the National Judicial Police Unit of the Gendarmerie Nationale, the project also carries a personal dimension for its lead, who grew up in Laval and visited the show as a child, before returning to the same stage today to receive an award. Laval, producing XR talent!
