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Comment by Kyragem | Hacker News Reader

VR will never have mass market adoption if they don't solve VR sickness first. Recent studies even show that it especially affects women due to physiological differences in visual and vestibular systems and may explains why only 5% of oculus/vive owners are females. Instead of funding lots of mediocre games, Oculus should really dedicate some resources in solving this particular problem, which excludes a large portion of our population from using VR.

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Plenty of wildly successful mass market products from videogames to deodorant are marketed specifically to men, some always have been -- there are a few billion men after all. There's no reason women necessarily have to buy a product for it to be either successful or viable, and vice versa, products solely for women can also be a huge success.

VR will get better; focusing on women who are far less likely to spend thousands of dollars on a hardcore gaming setup is not sane. I know a guy who bought, successively, a PS3, a high-end PC, and a PS4... and a copy of GTAV for each. How many women spend that kind of money gaming? Who is the average customer for a racing wheel, a flight yoke, a VR headset, an arcade fight stick, a set of 3 curved LCDs, etc?

Your argument is an appeal to prevailing politics and emotion, not market logic and economics.

Your viewpoint is biased. Maybe women don't buy hardcore gaming setups but in 2014 they constituted 52% of the gaming demographic.

The definition of gaming in that study was pretty shoddy, if i remember correctly. It wasn't the type of gaming that would also get people into buying high end pcs and vr headsets.

Irrelevant. If candy crush isn't selling VR headsets or expensive systems capable of playing VR games, it doesn't matter if 100% of women are playing it 24 hours a day. It's irrelevant.

The only relevant thing is how do women fit into the VR market and do they constitute enough of an opportunity to divert resources from the hardcore game dev program to female biological ergonomics (i.e. addressing the motion sickness, instead of the small game library).

If you want to sell another 5 million VR headsets, the sole relevant question is, what is the most effective way to achieve that? Is it

1] making more & better games

2] making VR more female-friendly

the answer is 1, apparently. Billion dollar companies spend time researching these things before pulling the trigger.

Is VR sickness still an issue in games without artificial locomotion? Most games these days tend to at least include an option for a locomotion system that doesn't result in VR sickness. (Like teleportation.)

Yes, but I think people are getting better at finding ways of working around it. The locomotion problem in VR reminds me of the camera problem in the early days of 3D games. It's hard to imagine now, but when games became 3D nobody knew what was the best thing to do with the camera. Should it be in a corner of every room you walk into so you could watch yourself walk by? Should it follow you? If so, how does it follow you through a door, or when back into a corner. All the conventions that you take for granted in games took a couple years to figure out.

Unquestionably artificial locomotion greatly exacerbates VR sickness, but I and many others still get it even after an hour or so in "seated" experiences. This naturally varies from person to person, and supposedly one can develop "VR legs" if the comments I see on forums are to be believed. I'm certainly not prepared to train my body in my free time to get better at this if it involves repeatedly making myself feel sick.

I personally regard the 800ish dollars I invested in a Rift + Touch setup the worst technology investment I've ever made, and the concept of VR style gaming was the stuff of childhood dreams for me. I really hope this gets much, much better before I would consider dipping my toe again.

What percent of early adopters (of any tech) are women?

What percent of pre-order game sales are attributed to women?

If neither is significantly greater than 5%, your point doesn't hold up.

Video games have shown a gender parity for the past 10 years. 76% of facebook users are female. Blatantly ignoring and excluding this demographic is going to be the nail in the coffin of VR. ....but who knows maybe VR's 3rd wave in 2028 will get it right?

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