"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.”
Read the rest here and please consider sharing!
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 
Leave a comment