Imagining Space Crime: Using Virtual Reality to Advance our Understanding of Space Crime

Only a limited number of people have been to outer space. Imagining what it is like to be in space, let alone imagining how crime happens and our responses to such crimes, is a challenge. To advance our knowledge of space crime we need to bring space to earth. In this chapter, I make the case for virtual reality (VR) as our prime candidate to do so. With VR, a virtual world can be created in which the recipient can be placed in any situation imaginable: a fantasy world in which you battle dragons, a supermarket to explore how music impacts purchasing behaviour, or even outer space. In this chapter, I dive into the use of VR to study crime and criminal behaviour and the close approximation to the real-world behaviour of its recipients. Then I explore how the benefits of VR can be applied to understand space crime. First, I look into the potential of VR to give people the closest experience of being in outer space …