Wagner James Au / New World Notes

As I recently noted, an Iowa State University study funded in part by the National Science Foundation seems to confirm danah boyd’s early research that virtual reality tends to make women nauseous:

As part of a larger study on adaptation to cybersickness, the ISU researchers recruited 150 participants to play up to 20 minutes of a VR game with a headset. The participants were new to VR and could stop if they felt too sick to continue. The researchers found women ended the game early twice as often as men and reported a sickness intensity that was 40% higher.

Emphasis mine. Notably, as study lead Dr. Jonathan Kelly tells me, most of these tests were conducted via Quest and Quest 2 headsets. (“We are now transitioning to the Quest 3 but have not collected much data with this one yet.”)

Also notable (to me at least): 

Dr. Kelly tells me no one at Meta, let alone the VR industry at large, has contacted him about these findings.

“I'm not sure why they haven't reached out,” he tells me by e-mail. “My guess is they have their own ideas of how to solve the problem of cybersickness, but I don't think the industry track record on that is very good.”  

He adds that they may just be unaware of this research (from a NSF-backed, well-ranked science and technology-focused university), but I tend to agree about the unimpressive track record. Then again, no one at Meta contacted boyd about her findings, even though she’s a senior researcher at Microsoft.

So I remain even more mind-boggled that Meta is still spending billions marketing its Quest devices as a mass market product without evidently worrying that they tend to make half the population sick.

For VR developers who are interested in minimizing VR nausea/cybersickness, Dr. Kelly has some advice:

“In terms of general advice, I think the biggest issue is currently with locomotion interfaces. Joystick locomotion is so widespread, but it causes substantial cybersickness in many users. Getting people to move so that their body-based senses are consistent with the visual input can go a long way to reducing cybersickness. Other techniques like field of view reduction are also pretty effective, but not perfect and they come at a visual cost.”

The larger solution may be creating a VR experience with a gentler on-ramp:

“In the longer term, I think we need tools that help new users acclimate to VR rather than jumping into the deep end and having a negative experience that might drive them away from VR. Protocols for new users could ensure they do not take on too much at the beginning, while giving them opportunities to extend their VR exposure time and not rely on things like field of view reduction. My lab is working on some of the basic research that would support such protocols. However, none of that work is published yet.”

As for danah boyd’s speculation that the gender difference in VR nausea may have a hormonal component, he says there’s not enough data to answer that question, but there are some intriguing findings:

“I do not know of any good studies on cybersickness and hormones,” as he puts it. “There has been some research on motion sickness and hormones, and sometimes we extrapolate (cautiously) from the motion sickness literature to cybersickness. For example, Golding, Kadzere, and Gresty (2005) reported that motion sickness is related to hormonal fluctuations during the menstrual cycle. However, they also note that the effect of hormonal fluctuations was much smaller than the gender effect itself, so it is not likely to be the primary explanation.”

He believes any gender difference might be related to social differences, and less central to the overall challenge of overcoming VR nausea:  

“[S]ome of my research on the gender effect indicates that 1) the effect is relatively small, and 2) the effect is partially explained by differences in prior experience of visually-induced sickness (e.g., screen-based games, movies). It's certainly a topic worth investigating, but it's worth a reminder that there are vast individual differences in cybersickness susceptibility even within a given gender.”

So the research continues. And I’m looking forward to those protocols on reducing cybersickness — whether or not anyone at Meta is.