10 Years Ago, After Facebook Bought Oculus, a Top Academic Warned About VR Causing Females Nausea. No One at Facebook/Meta Followed Up.

This week we're seeing many stories marking the 10th anniversary of Facebook/Meta's acquisition of Oculus, with some wondering why the VR device (later rebranded as the Quest), hasn't changed the world as expected.

Maybe I missed it, but none of these articles have mentioned nor even asked Meta about the vomitous elephant in the room: There is substantial research that VR tends to make females nauseous.

As I write in Making a Metaverse That Matters, no one at Meta, and hardly anyone across the VR industry, followed up with the top technology academic who raised this point the very same month Facebook acquired Oculus in 2014:

Shortly after the Oculus purchase was announced, esteemed academic danah boyd, a Partner Researcher at Microsoft Research, published a much-discussed opinion piece in the online business site Quartz, proactively entitled: “Is the Oculus Rift sexist?”.

In it, danah brought up an earlier study she had published which strongly suggested VR tended to make women nauseous. It began as a grad student given a chance to try out an early VR demo:

"Ecstatic at seeing a real-life instantiation of the Metaverse, the virtual world imagined in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, I donned a set of goggles and jumped inside. And then I promptly vomited."

Hardly an obscure researcher, danah is a widely and frequently cited expert in tech and mainstream media, especially around her work on teens and social networks.

That VR can cause nausea has been fairly well known for decades — it was reported by military researchers as far back as the 1960s, who noticed it among some volunteers testing early flight simulators. However, it’s often attributed to poor graphics or how the sensation of motion is displayed. Any variation in VR nausea based on gender is usually explained away by pointing out that males tend to play 3D video games more than females, and are therefore better acclimated to immersive virtual reality.

But what danah discovered went deeper than that. She noted, for instance, that a difference around experiencing 3D was even observable in trans people at a gender clinic in the Netherlands — and that it also influenced thinking about 3D:

"[Researchers] found that people taking androgens (a steroid hormone similar to testosterone) improved at tasks that required them to rotate Tetris-like shapes in their mind to determine if one shape was simply a rotation of another shape. Meanwhile, male-to-female transsexuals saw a decline in performance during their hormone replacement therapy.

"Although there was variability across the board, men are more likely to use the cues that 3D virtual reality systems relied on…. …. I’d posit that the problems of nausea and simulator sickness that many people report when using VR headsets go deeper than pixel persistence and latency rates."

Emphasis mine, because it bears repeating: As I read it, danah’s research suggests that the different responses to VR based on gender happen at the hormonal level, and therefore, may not be addressable by technical improvements.

danah ended her essay with a call for researchers to follow up on her findings around biology and VR: “In other words, are systems like Oculus fundamentally (if inadvertently) sexist in their design?” It was not a condemnation of VR per se, but a call for researchers working in the technology to explore her findings.

“I want folks to take what I did and push it further,” as danah told me at the time. “If researchers start to investigate this issue, I’ll be ecstatic.”

On this point, she has not been made very ecstatic:

Few if any VR industry leaders contacted her after the Quartz essay was published, she told me; nor later in 2017, after a study published in Experimental Brain Research seemed to confirm danah’s findings of nausea propensity based on gender.

Reached in late 2022 for this book, danah tells me that the team developing HoloLens, the augmented reality headset owned by Microsoft, had been probing at the questions she raised.

However, she doesn’t recall anyone from Oculus or Meta ever approaching her: “To my knowledge, they did not pursue any of those research questions.”

I’ve repeatedly asked Meta about this, and received no reply. In 2017, I asked John Carmack himself if the company had tested its product by gender to address the issues that danah had raised. He wasn’t sure.

“I’m not involved with any of our user studies,” Carmack told me then, “so I don’t have any insight there.” He pointed me to Oculus’ PR contact, but my question to them yielded no answer.

“I mean, danah’s a friend, so of course I knew about it,” Cory Ondrejka tells me now. He agrees that more studies on this topic are needed.

“danah’s research was super super-early on this one and the opportunity for Meta has always been to have a scale of resources to be able to do much deeper research on this question,” as he puts it.

“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.”

I cannot overstress how mind-boggling an oversight on Meta’s part this is.

The topic is still not being addressed across the industry, even after VentureBeat ran my editorial on this topic. My biggest surprise is the major media is not asking Meta about this topic. By now everyone knows VR is a niche technology with very few users compared to other device types. The mystery is why few are wondering if making half the population sick to their stomach is probably a major reason why.