Virtual Reality
The tech industry is rife with examples of tech that forget about women. Virtual reality (VR) headsets that are too big for the average woman’s head; a ‘haptic jacket’ (a jacket that simulates touch) that fits snugly on a male body, but on a female reviewer’s body ‘could have fit over a puffy winter coat’; augmented-reality glasses whose lenses are too far apart for a woman to focus on the image, ‘or whose frames immediately fall off my face’.
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Most VR companies aren’t founded by women, however, and so the VR experience often comes with an in-built male bias. Like much of the online world, VR gaming seems to have a sexual harassment problem – and this problem is something VR’s mainly male developers are routinely forgetting to account for.
When author and gamer Jordan Belamire tried the VR game in multiplayer mode, she was sexually assaulted by another user called BigBro4. ‘Virtual’ makes it sound like it isn’t real – but it felt real to Belamire. And no wonder. VR is meant to feel real, and it can be so successful at tricking your brain that it is being explored as a treatment forPTSD, phobias, even phantom-limb syndrome.
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Male violence is far from the only issue keeping women out of VR. From the oversized headsets, to research showing that VR causes motion sickness in women to a far larger degree than it does in men, to the fact that narrow computer displays favour men in tasks that require spatial awareness, you’re left with another platform that just doesn’t work well for women – and that is therefore likely to have fewer women on it.
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We don’t know exactly why women are more likely to experience motion sickness while using VR, but Microsoft researcher danah boyd conducted a study that suggests a possible explanation. Human eyes use two basic cues to determine depth: ‘motion parallax’ and ‘shape-from- shading’. Motion parallax refers to how an object seems bigger or smaller depending on how close you are to it, while shape-from-shading refers to the way the shading of a point changes as you move. And while 3D VR is pretty good at rendering motion parallax, it still does ‘a terrible job’ of emulating shape-from-shading.
This discrepancy creates sex differences in how well VR works, because, as boyd discovered, men are ‘significantly more likely’ to rely on motion parallax for depth perception, while women rely on shape-from-shading. 3D environments are literally sending out information signals that benefit male over female depth perception. The question is: would we be so behind on recreating shape-from-shading if we had been testing 3D VR on equal numbers of men and women from the start?
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