Gender differences in cybersickness: Clarifying confusion and identifying paths forward

Abstract

Cybersickness is a barrier to widespread adoption of virtual reality (VR). We summarize the literature and conclude that women experience more cybersickness than do men, but that the size of the gender effect is modest. We present a mediation and moderation framework for organizing existing research and proposing new questions about gender and cybersickness. A mediator causally connects gender and cybersickness, and a moderator changes the magnitude of the gender difference in cybersickness.

The Least Increasing Aversion (LIA) Protocol: Illustration on Identifying Individual Susceptibility to Cybersickness Triggers

“…Despite the growing number of research papers, the findings remain contradictory [2], [5], [8]. For instance, the influence of gender on cybersickness susceptibility can be categorized into two opposing camps: one which suggests that females are more susceptible to cybersickness than males [5], [9], [10], [11], [12], and another which indicates that there is no significant difference between genders in terms of individual susceptibility [13], [14], [15], [16], [17]. Similarly, conflicting conclusions have been reached when examining the influence of age or past experiences on cybersickness [2], [18].…”

“…However, increasing the number of participants itself could increase the chance of finding a difference [19]. Very few papers reported effect size in their studies [2], [12]. Consequently, from a statistical standpoint, validating whether a difference is attributed to an individual factor such as gender, or simply due to the utilization of a large sample size poses a challenging task.…”

“…We computed longitudinal trajectories of each participant in each session. Figures 11,12,13,14 are organized by grouping the selected path with participant ID on top of each sub-figure, from which we identified seven highly-sensitive participants with low tolerance to cybersickness. We employed different colors to distinguish the sessions based on their potential to induce cybersickness.…”

Does interpupillary distance (IPD) relate to immediate cybersickness?

“…Although the theoretical understanding of cybersickness is debated, research indicates that individual susceptibility depends on many factors, including gender, race, age, and prior VR experience [2,3,7]. Stanney and colleagues [9] recently documented a gender difference in cybersickness that was explained by a mismatch between the participant's interpupillary distance (IPD) and the allowable IPD range in the head-mounted display (HMD).…”

“…Participants in their study experienced a roller-coaster simulation followed by five administrations of the Simulator Sickness Questionnaire (SSQ [4]): immediately after exposure and every 15 minutes thereafter for one hour. In general, women experienced greater sickness than men (see [2] for a recent review on the subject). Further analyses focused on a measure that averaged the 4th and 5th administrations of the SSQ, a measure termed "cybersickness recovery."…”