Applied Theater with Emerging Media
A research-through-design project combining participatory performance, mixed reality, and interactive non-fiction to investigate how communities can construct, negotiate, and communicate representations of shared experience.
Emerging media can expand expression—but access to their rhetorical affordances is uneven.
Interactive non-fiction frequently adopts new media in order to represent reality, educate audiences, and motivate action. Yet the ability to use an emerging medium is not distributed evenly. Communities with early access to technical infrastructure and production literacy are better positioned to construct public representations through those technologies; communities without that access arrive later and with fewer opportunities to shape the medium's conventions.
My dissertation approached this as both a theoretical and a design problem: rather than asking only how XR might represent a community, I asked how participants could gain enough expressive control over mixed reality to construct and negotiate representations themselves.
A framework, a workshop method, and a mixed-reality authoring system.
I developed the project as an integrated research apparatus rather than a standalone app. The work combined a rhetorical framework for interactive non-fiction, a participatory workshop informed by applied-theater practice, the Our Reality mobile mixed-reality system, and an empirical evaluation of how participants used the system to create shared representations.
My role
I developed the theoretical framework, designed the workshop methodology, designed and developed the mixed-reality application, structured the study, facilitated the research process with collaborators, and conducted the mixed-method evaluation reported in my dissertation.
Physical space became a shared canvas for constructing an argument.
Workshop scenarios drew from Georgia Tech's I Feel Safe When public arts campaign, which collected student accounts of moments when they felt safe or unsafe on campus. Participants worked with those stories and their own situated knowledge to construct mixed-reality scenes in a black-box theater.
The system was designed around a shared mediated gaze: participants could see the same spatial layer, place and manipulate 3D material, draw and recolor elements, introduce 360° imagery, and negotiate how an experience should be represented in relation to the physical environment. The interface therefore functioned not only as a production tool but as a site where different perspectives could be made visible, discussed, and revised.
The prototype was evaluated as part of a mixed-method naturalistic study.
Thirteen undergraduate participants completed the final study: eight participants who had received extended training with the workshop and system, and five novice participants. Participants worked in four groups to review documentary material, construct an AR scene, and negotiate whether that scene represented the source material and their shared reality.
Expressive control, situatedness, and shared participation mattered more than technological novelty.
The study was exploratory and small, so I do not treat these results as generalizable causal claims. They do, however, identify design relationships that became central to my subsequent research on agency, representation, and emerging media.
Participants were more likely to regard scenes as identifiable when they could successfully express an idea, when the representation was meaningfully situated in the physical environment, and when co-creation enabled participants to negotiate a shared perspective.
- Usability affected expression. Technical friction could constrain a participant's ability to make the representation they intended.
- Physical situatedness mattered. Scenes that meaningfully incorporated the physical environment tended to be perceived as more identifiable.
- The shared mediated gaze mattered. Participants used the common AR layer to give spatial form to experiences and ideas that were otherwise difficult to visualize.
- Participation shaped documentary voice. Active co-creation and negotiation influenced how participants understood authorship and the resulting representation.
Our Reality in use
This demonstration documents the prototype interface and interaction model used during the dissertation research.
Building the system made technical architecture part of the research question.
The project established a model that continues to inform my work: computational systems do not simply carry a representation from author to audience. Their interfaces, tracking systems, interaction rules, and shared spatial architectures participate in determining who can express an idea, how that idea becomes legible to others, and how authority over representation is distributed.
The dissertation also made clear that access and literacy are inseparable from system design. An authoring tool intended to broaden participation can reproduce exclusion when devices, interfaces, or technical procedures prevent participants from exercising meaningful control.
This work became a foundation for later practice-based experiments in community storytelling, shared XR performance, and the study of agency in computational media.
Research outputs
- Dissertation · 2019 Fisher, Joshua A. Interactive Non-fiction with Reality Media: Rhetorical Affordances. Georgia Institute of Technology.
- Book Chapter · 2020 Fisher, Joshua A. “Mixed Reality Applied Theatre at Universities.” New Perspectives on Virtual and Augmented Reality in Education.
- Invited Talk · 2021 “Applied Theater with Mixed Reality for Participatory Futures,” University of Skövde.
Collaborative research, clearly attributed.
Research leadership
Joshua A. Fisher
Lead researcher, theoretical framework, workshop design, mixed-reality interaction design,
application development, study design, and evaluation.
Institutional & community context
Augmented Environments Lab, Georgia Institute of Technology; Georgia Tech's I Feel Safe When arts initiative; and collaborating facilitators and campus groups.