{"id":5367,"date":"2021-03-09T05:45:43","date_gmt":"2021-03-09T05:45:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/techclot.com\/index.php\/2021\/03\/09\/crimedoor-opens-the-ar-door-to-unsolved-murders\/"},"modified":"2021-03-09T05:45:43","modified_gmt":"2021-03-09T05:45:43","slug":"crimedoor-opens-the-ar-door-to-unsolved-murders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/techclot.com\/index.php\/2021\/03\/09\/crimedoor-opens-the-ar-door-to-unsolved-murders\/","title":{"rendered":"CrimeDoor opens the ‘AR’ door to unsolved murders"},"content":{"rendered":"

CrimeDoor opens the ‘AR’ door to unsolved murders<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

Who killed JonBenet Ramsey is still unknown. The granddaughters of a lead investigator in the 1996 case promised to carry on the investigation, and launched a podcast devoted to the murder case.<\/p>\n

Citizen sleuths can study details of this celebrated case and others, and through AR \u2012 augmented reality \u2012 step inside the murder scene using CrimeDoor, an app dedicated to true crime stories.<\/p>\n

Sonoma Valley\u2019s Ben Flajnik, who gained notoriety for his run on TV reality series \u201cThe Bachelorette,\u201c is the director of business development for CrimeDoor. Flajnik said there are \u201ccertain cases that hit closer to home.\u201d For him, it is the 1996 Menendez brothers murder case that convicted brothers Lyle and Erik Menendez for the 1989 murder of their parents, Jose and Kitty Menendez.<\/p>\n

Flajnik was born in New Jersey and his family lived near the Menendez family. He didn\u2019t know the family, but his mother did. \u201cMy mom used to play tennis with Kitty and knew them. My mom talked about the glamorous parties she threw,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s always been a case that\u2019s been on my radar,\u201d Flajnik said.<\/p>\n

The Menendez murders are a solved case \u2013 and there are several on the app including the Ramon Salcido 1989 mass murders in Sonoma County \u2013 but CrimeDoor\u2019s hook is the unsolved murders such as that of JonBenet Ramsey, the 6-year-old child beauty queen found dead in her family\u2019s basement in Colorado.<\/p>\n

Her parents John and Patsy Ramsey were suspects, but Lou Smit, a detective who came out of retirement to work on the case, concluded that the couple was not involved in the murder. When he died in 2010 he asked his family to carry on the investigation.<\/p>\n

They might get some help from CrimeDoor.<\/p>\n

Husband and wife team Neil and Lauren Mandt are the founders of CrimeDoor. Neil has a long list of Hollywood credits, from producing and making films, to developing and selling shows. If Neil closely follows media trends, Lauren is a true crime buff. They paired their interests and created CrimeDoor.<\/p>\n

Not a \u201ctech guy,\u201d Neil said he noticed it was getting harder to sell show ideas because viewers were \u201cleaving cable.\u201d He had been paying attention to advancement in technology; when Facebook bought virtual reality company Oculus in 2014, that was his turning point.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat began the immersive media push,\u201d Neil said. \u201cI dedicated all my time into immersive media.\u201d<\/p>\n

The couple produced the virtual reality show of the 2018 Superbowl with the Philadelphia Eagles and the New England Patriots, for example.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were the official company for Indy Car and did a live New Year\u2019s Eve for Fox,\u201d and won a couple of technology Emmy awards, Neil said.<\/p>\n

Both the market and the technology needed more maturity, he said, but when the mobile game Pokemon Go came out in 2016 he knew augmented reality would take off. While it might seem that Pokemon flamed out because it is not talked about as much, Neil said in 2020 it made a profit of $100 million a month.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is a thing, no question it is a thing,\u201d he said of augmented reality (AR).<\/p>\n

Neil and Lauren focused on how they could use AR in a way that would \u201cenhance two-dimensional content, and what is that content,\u201d Neil said.<\/p>\n

Lauren said: \u201cAnd along the way I was going to sleep every night watching \u2018Forensic Files\u2019 or listening to every podcast\u2026there was of true crimes.\u201d She said she was \u201call in\u201d \u2013 reading books, watching TV shows, listening to podcasts \u2013 \u201cwhatever it is I can\u2019t get enough. So, I\u2019m truly the consumer that our app is made for.\u201d<\/p>\n

Drawing on Neil\u2019s experience in news \u2013 he was a reporter and producer covering such trials as the O.J. Simpson and the Oklahoma City bombing \u2013 they drew on their interests and backgrounds to come up with CrimeDoor. It\u2019s been a \u201ccovid\u201d project, too, Lauren said, and a \u201clabor of love\u201d as they work on it every day.<\/p>\n

In six weeks the app went to 220,000 downloads from 11,000 downloads, Neil said, with little media attention paid to it so far.<\/p>\n

Some of the content is free, including the AR JonBenet Ramsey case, but to step through the \u201cAR Doors\u201d for crime scenes of drug kingpin Pablo Escobar or Italian fashion designer Gianni Versace, for example, there is a fee.<\/p>\n

The images found stepping through the doors are pieced together from actual images of the cases and through the screen of a smartphone users can move the phone this way and that to take in a view of the entire crime scene.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Published at Tue, 09 Mar 2021 02:03:45 +0000<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

CrimeDoor opens the ‘AR’ door to unsolved murders Who killed JonBenet Ramsey is still unknown….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":5368,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[61],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-augmented-virtual-reality"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/techclot.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/imengine.prod.srp.navigacloud.com","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3orZX-1oz","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/techclot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5367","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/techclot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/techclot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techclot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techclot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5367"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/techclot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5367\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techclot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/techclot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techclot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techclot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}