BIOASTRONAUTICS
RESEARCH
Where the performance becomes the science.
Pairing performance with science to understand human adaptation in space
The same cameras that film our performance give early estimates of heart rate, muscle activation and movement quality through computer vision, with no wearables on the body. The camera is both an artistic instrument and a scientific one. And the performance is the dataset.
Imagine the benefits. Commercial space stations are about to host ordinary humans in orbit, and the data on untrained people up there barely exists. We are capturing bodies doing complex creative work as gravity changes. Building the first version of a health monitoring suite for long-duration missions.
Space Wonders produces performances in microgravity and brings them home as entertainment, experiences, and science.
Its flagship production, PARABOLES, is a research-driven multimedia performance in microgravity. The cameras that make the film are also research instruments. Every frame is read twice: as story and signal.
Reading the Body in Space
By Florencia Franceschetti · Togetherwith · September 2026
What does it feel like to be in an environment your body has never known?
For Space Wonders, that question is both artistic and scientific. Space Wonders creates performances in microgravity and translates them into cultural experiences on Earth. Its flagship production, PARABOLES, is a research-driven performance staged in weightlessness, and increasingly, the footage captured for that performance during training and rehearsals is becoming a new kind of research material.
Working with Eugene Duvenage, Bioastronautics Officer and Researcher at the University of Reading and embedded researcher at Space Wonders, the company is exploring whether standard video can reveal information about what is happening inside a performer’s body as gravity changes.
“We essentially are setting out to create a way to monitor astronaut health or, well, astronaut artist health, in a way that doesn't involve a bunch of sensors that have to make contact with the body,” Duvenage explains.
What can a camera see?
Duvenage has developed a computer-vision pipeline that analyzes ordinary video for several biometric signals.
One technique, remote photoplethysmography (rPPG), detects tiny changes in facial skin color caused by blood circulating with each heartbeat. Those changes can be used to estimate pulse and heart rate, while blood-pressure estimation from rPPG still remains considerably more experimental and requires individual or population-level calibration and validation.
As Duvenage puts it, the system produces a pulse waveform from light reflecting off the blood: "And we're just doing that with the webcam."
No contact sensors are needed for this first-pass analysis.
Space Wonders has now applied the pipeline across footage from three gravitational conditions: rehearsals on Earth at 1 G, parabolic flight at lunar gravity, approximately 0.17 G, and archival astronaut footage from the International Space Station in near-zero gravity.
The result is a frame-by-frame experimental view of how physiological and movement signals might change as gravity changes.
"We're just doing that with the webcam."
Eugene Duvenage, Bioastronautics Researcher
In the experiment phase
These outputs are approximations, not clinical measurements.
The next phase of the PARABOLES research plan is validation, comparing the video-derived results against contact sensors such as ECG, EMG and cuff-based blood pressure.
There are other limitations to solve, too. Lighting affects optical measurements, and current methods do not perform equally across all skin tones. Space Wonders plans to test its models on more representative datasets and explore thermal imaging as an additional source of physiological information.
For Duvenage, testing under real conditions is essential. "Most models are built under lab circumstances, like most data sets are gathered under really clean circumstances."
Space is anything but an ordinary laboratory.
The images speak two languages
That is also where the research connects most directly to Space Wonders' artistic practice.
The artistic capture and the scientific dataset are the same material, read in two languages.
To a filmmaker, a frame contains gesture, expression, movement and story. To a computer-vision model, that same frame contains changes in skin color, joint positions, movement trajectories and possible physiological signals.
Space Wonders does not have to choose between the two. The cameras required to create PARABOLES can potentially become research instruments at the same time, allowing the studio to investigate not only what performance in space looks like, but what it asks of the human body.
And solving those problems in an environment as constrained as space could eventually have implications beyond it.
"If we solve all the constraints for space, Earth becomes easy."
Eugene Duvenage
"The big thing is we need to understand the limitations first," Duvenage says. "But my argument is if we solve it for up there, then it becomes much easier down here. Like if we solve all the constraints for space, Earth becomes easy."
Space Wonders plans to publish its methodology and findings as open-access research alongside the Microgravity Performance Playbook in 2027.
The larger question behind the work is simple: how much can we learn about a human body in space simply by watching it?
For PARABOLES, the performance is the artwork, the footage is the film, and the images are also data.
"The performance is the artwork, the footage is the film, and the images are also data."
Florencia Franceschetti
Flor Franceschetti is a journalist and communications strategist at Togetherwith, which works with Space Wonders on press and institutional relationships. She wrote this piece in September 2026.
What's next?
Approximations today. Validation next.
Validate
Compare video-derived signals against ECG, EMG and cuff-based blood pressure.
Widen
Test on more representative datasets across skin tones and lighting; add thermal imaging as a second source.
Publish
Open-access methodology and findings, released with the Microgravity Performance Playbook in 2027.
With the Support of
The rockets are taking off.
Culture is boarding.
