You’re Making Me Sick: A Systematic Review of How Virtual Reality Research Considers Gender & Cybersickness

© {Owner/Author | ACM} 2021. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445701. While multiple studies suggest that female-identified participants are more likely to experience cybersickness in virtual reality (VR), our systematic review of 71 eligible VR publications (59 studies and 12 surveys) pertaining to gender and cybersickness reveals a number of confounding factors in study design (e.g., a variety of technical specifications, tasks, content), a lack of demographic data, and a bias in participant recruitment. Our review shows an ongoing need within VR research to more consistently include and report on women’s experiences in VR to better understand the gendered possibility of cybersickness. Based on the gaps identified in our systematic review, we contribute study design recommendations for future work, arguing that gender considerations are necessary at every stage of VR study design, even when the study is not ‘about’ gender. Funder 1, NSERC Discovery Grant 2016-04422 || Funder 2, NSERC Discovery Accelerator Grant 492970-2016 || Funder 3, NSERC CREATE Saskatchewan-Waterloo Games User Research (SWaGUR) Grant 479724-2016 || Funder 4, Ontario Early Researcher Award ER15-11-184