Filling in Memory Holes: The green screening research

As a Media & Arts Technology PhD student at Queen Mary University of London, I'm currently doing my Advanced Placement Project with the Performance Company Split Britches and In Company Collective.

Together, we have been exploring the potential of a mixed-reality system as a rehabilitation tool for stroke survivors. My research, during Placement, aims to develop new mixed-reality stage environments for the project ‘Green Screening’: a workshop for stroke survivors, created by the performance company ‘Split Britches’.

The workshop process currently uses chroma-key techniques to place stroke survivors in a fantasy world of their own making. The underlying idea is that this provides a productive and therapeutic way for them to fill in the 'blank spaces' left behind after a stroke with new images and insights. The objective of this project is to provide a new, more effective technical infrastructure for this project that goes beyond chroma-key by taking advantage of the potential for projecting embodied interaction into a virtual environment.

We explore the concept of real-time configurable digital scenography for a live audience, as a means to push a stroke survivor’s imagination and creativity forward and aiming to answer the questions: Can performance techniques help people to recover from a stroke? And how is stroke survivors’ experience transformed through the implementation mixed-reality techniques?

If you want to know more about the process and future results, please visit my Research Blog of the project: https://splitbritchesblog.wordpress.com