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:
(more…)
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 