Despite Warnings from Top Researcher, Meta Has Not Seriously Researched VR's Strong Propensity to Cause Females Nausea (Far As I Can Tell)

"With Vision Pro launched, companies must talk about XR, nausea and gender" is a new Gamesbeat editorial that's an expanded excerpt of my new book, highlighting the most shocking thing I discovered while writing Making a Metaverse That Matters:

Meta, from what I can tell -- and I've brought this up with several senior executives, including former Oculus CTO John Carmack -- has not done any substantial research into a gender component around VR and nausea, first raised by danah boyd and backed up by several subsequent studies.

Specifically: that females have a strong propensity to get nauseous in VR.

I cannot overstress how flummoxing an oversight this is on Meta’s part, and for the tech world as a whole. Meta paid $2 billion for a piece of technology intended for a mass consumer market, even though reputable research suggested it tends to make half the population literally vomit.

My hope is tech reporters with large publications pursue this question with executives at Meta and other companies in XR (including now Apple). Anytime an article or news segment features images of women and girls happily enjoying an HMD experience, the media outlet is actively helping to obscure this extremely important, live topic.

Interestingly, there's some Linden Lab overlap to this question. Avi Bar-Zeev was a very early Linden (and most recently, helped develop the Vision Pro for Apple), and Meta's entrance into VR was driven by Second Life's co-founder:

To date, my only direct response to this question from someone associated with Meta has been from Cory Ondrejka, a veteran engineer and co-founder of the virtual world Second Life, who was a VP at Facebook back in 2014, where he led the social network’s move to acquire Oculus.

Ondrejka told me that he knows of no research conducted by Facebook/Meta on this topic — but he’s well aware that VR nausea based on sex differences is still very much a live question.

“I mean, danah’s a friend, so of course I knew about it,” as Ondrejka put it to me recently. “[T]he opportunity for Meta has always been to have a scale of resources to be able to do much deeper research on this question. This is all still such an early moment in VR, there are tons of things we don’t understand about how people react to this. If I was ever in charge of VR stuff again, I would be paying for these studies.” (Ondrejka is no longer with Facebook/Meta.)

... For the most part however, companies in AR/VR aren’t running similar studies on their own products — or just as concerning, sharing them in public. Hence Avi Bar-Zeev’s call for them to share their data. He’s also recruiting people in the industry to join his non-profit XR Guild, to discuss this and other pressing issues.

“On the point of gender differences, I hope companies can share more open research on this,” Bar-Zeev told me recently.

If they don’t, he adds, “we should assume they’re worried about something, or they just don’t care.”

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Comments

[seph]

Apple literally created and included the R1 chip in the Vision Pro to help eliminate motion sickness.

Generally VR headsets have improved a lot with higher refresh rates and resolutions that always help as well.

If you watch Youtube or Twitch streamers that play VR games, including women, you'll notice they aren't uncontrollably vomiting even after hours of highly involved gaming. The vast majority of users of good hardware are fine.

Motion sickness is and will always be an issue for a subset of users, but that subset has and will continue to become increasingly small as they use newer, better hardware. It's important not to clump Meta or Apple's newer headsets in with the original Oculus or Vive or worse, the slew of bad kickstarter headsets or abandoned Windows Mixed Reality headsets that came out.

The bar is the Quest 3 and Apple Vision Pro. What studies on motion sickness are there on those, and how have things improved vs. earlier generation VR/AR? There's a fairer and useful story to tell there if you're really interested!

[Wagner James Au]

> If you watch Youtube or Twitch streamers that play VR games, including women

The question isn't whether *some* women don't get nauseous in VR -- clearly women who are personally into VR enjoy many/most VR experiences just fine.

[seph]

"Anytime an article or news segment features images of women and girls happily enjoying an HMD experience, the media outlet is actively helping to obscure this extremely important, live topic."

Sorry, that made it sound like you were questioning whether women really do enjoy VR/AR headsets without getting nauseous.

If not then, what obscuring is happening? Motion sickness isn't something that came along with VR/AR. Nor studies showing it disproportionately effects women vs. men. A double digit percentage of humans are prone to motion sickness from anything that can cause it. Cars, boats, etc. Like those, all technology companies can do is mitigate it.

How well have Meta and Apple done with their most recent headsets? Any old articles on the problem from nearly 10 years ago don't apply except to hardware from that period. They aren't on shelves anymore.

[Wagner James Au]

This is all covered in the article/book, but there's been multiple studies showing that women very disproportionately suffer nausea in VR. The most noteworthy aspect (to me) is danah boyd's research, based on studies of trans people, pointing to a hormonal component to how we process 3D.

[Ikarus3D]

The incorporation of the R1 chip in the Apple Vision Pro aims to address motion sickness in VR, complementing advancements like higher refresh rates and resolutions. Watching VR streamers, including women, showcases improved user experiences with newer hardware, indicating a diminishing subset affected by motion sickness. Meta and Apple's latest headsets, like the Quest 3 and Vision Pro, represent significant progress compared to earlier VR/AR devices, warranting exploration of studies on motion sickness and highlighting advancements in user comfort and immersion.