Scent Trails: Countering Terrorism through Informed Surveillance

This paper reports the DScenT (Detecting Scent Trails) project, which brought together technologists and behavioural scientists to design and evaluate novel methods for countering terrorism in public places. Through a mixture of prototyping and empirical evaluations, we developed and assessed an immersive environment for detecting and investigating deceptive behaviours indicative of terrorist activities. The environment comprised a location-based game called Cutting Corners. The game was used in field trials to test the efficacy of different methods for collecting and using evidence during investigative interviews with mock terrorist suspects and to examine effects of play on attitudes towards surveillance and counter-terrorism.