Wagner James Au / New World Notes

"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:

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