
Virtual reality affects men and women differently - killwhitey
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2014/04/03/is-the-oculus-rift-sexist.html
======
GuiA
An advisor for a startup where I used to work at worked heavily with VR
systems in the 80s/90s. I was having coffee with her a year or so ago, when I
had just received my devkit, and she was up in arms about how terrible motion
sickness was on the Rift.

"I was telling companies back then that their VR tech was doomed from the
start because of nausea, and it hasn't changed at all!"

This is a good tale of why having a more balanced gender ratio in the tech
industry is important. If 90% of Oculus designers/prototypers/engineers are
male, female voices will naturally get drowned. The problem is that if your
audience is potentially "all humans", the ratio is 50/50\. (although here, it
seems like a) there exists prior research in the literature and b) good user
testing could highlight that problem. If you're aspiring to doing any form of
quality R&D, being on top of those 2 things should be a priority)

As for the title, I initially disliked it, but as I read the article I changed
my opinion - I find it perfectly correct and just the right dose of
irreverentious. The way I interpret it is as follows: it would be correct to
label a poison which systematically kills any man who drinks it but not women
as "sexist". The problem is that our culture tends to bundle intent with
sexism, which is not the case - whether a process is sexist or not is
completely independent from intent, or even whether there is a sentient agent
behind it.

~~~
dang
Thank you for the highly substantive comment. I changed the title to be less
provocative because, even though both you and the author make a reasonable
case for it, I fear that it's too much for the thread to bear. Too many
comments are about the title as it is—but at least we're doing ok on civility!

~~~
detcader
Thank you; while in an ideal world people would apply the principle of charity
reflexively, the technology scene is occupied by too many men willing to do
exactly the opposite for anything women write about sex and gender

~~~
yummyfajitas
As a man with a marginally popular blog and what I'm told is an extremely
masculine writing style, I can assure you that virtually no one applies the
principle of charity.

For example, consider this post I wrote criticizing my third favorite
language:
[http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/why_not_python.html](http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/why_not_python.html)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5986158](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5986158)

Then go read the top comments either on the blog or HN. The top python geeks
(read: core numpy contributors) in the thread had no dispute with me, yet
there was a lot of clueless disagreement suggesting I never heard of
multiprocessing/zeromq/twisted/etc. The entire point of the post is that
multiprocessing+whatever is fundamentally slower/uses more memory/has worse
cache locality than shared memory+threads.

People don't read. They don't apply the principle of charity. They don't
follow your links to verify things. This is not a gendered problem.

(If you look for popular posts on my blog you can find lots of other examples,
I'm just sticking to a purely technical topic.)

~~~
detcader
It's not a binary; more people apply the principle of charity more often in
certain situations than others. It is not mutually exclusive that a certain
amount of people don't apply the principle of charity in situations where they
feel things about programming and Python specifically, and that a certain
amount of men feel things about gender and don't apply it. I feel that "things
women write" in my above comment probably should have been "things people
write" but otherwise I still see the problem as reflexive rejection by men of
tech-and-sex/gender pieces as "oh boy another feminist telling me I'm evil"
instead of more rational "I'm not a woman so I should listen to what women
have to say about sex/gender in tech even if it turns out I disagree."

~~~
aaronem
I think men in the industry would be more willing to default to your more
rational, and also more charitable, approach, had they not so much experience
of feminists telling them they are evil. After a while, anyone will get gun-
shy.

 _Exaggeratio ad absurdum_ is the besetting vice of identity politics. Nuance
ceases to matter, and then to exist, because everyone involved comes to feel
that his existence as a human being is on the line. For those who make such
belief their bread and butter, that's great! For everyone else, it gets hard
to take after a while.

~~~
detcader
Hm. When I made up a quote for the hypothetical man I was not actually trying
to posit that this man's encounters (as representative of the tech/programming
everyman's) with feminists consisted of him being told that he is evil. I
actually value what feminists write, something that you didn't seem to pick up
(not that I explicitly put it down).

Also you characterize my second "approach" as "charitable". This is
interesting; spending time listening to women is apparently charity, with "oh
boy another feminist move along" as the "[less][!] rational" baseline.

~~~
yummyfajitas
[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity)

You misinterpret the word "charitable".

------
dang
This was flagged by users. On the other hand, the article is clearly
substantive. As an experiment, I'm going to provisionally override the flags.
The thread hasn't degenerated into a flamewar so far; let's see if we can keep
it that way.

All: please take extra care to make your comments high in substance and
civility, and as low as possible in flammability.

~~~
andrewljohnson
I am curious if the users who flagged this have a lot of karma, or if they
clicked through or spent an appreciable amount of time before clicking a
different HN link.

I can't imagine anyone who actually read this article flagging it. And I doubt
the hypothesis that it was wise users trying to avoid a flame war. Occam's
razor - seems more like a knee-jerk reaction to the word sexist in the title.

~~~
revelation
I read the article, and I would certainly flag it. The article is clear to
focus on hormones and _biological factors_ , while most modern theories treat
gender as a _social construct_ , explicitly disconnected from actual
biological factors.

So the mention here is adding no value at best, at worst it uses the term in a
way that no longer matches up with the research around it.

(Not to mention that Oculus is _actively working_ to reduce the factors that
cause sickness (the one discussed here certainly isn't the only one))

edit: might the downvotes explain themselves? Surely it is known that _terms_
and _concepts_ don't have inherent, godgiven meaning and are at all times to
be interpreted in the context they are used and the interpretations ascribed
to them.

~~~
sliverstorm
I'm trying to understand here- are you basically arguing that the use of "man"
and "woman" is woefully inaccurate, and had "male" and "female" been used
instead, you'd have been onboard?

Because that sounds pretty damn nitpicky to me.

~~~
guscost
The original title: "Is the Oculus Rift Sexist?"

To the GP: Which word(s) should be used to describe differences in people due
to hormones and biological factors?

Using that particular word in the title does seem a bit keen on generating
controversy, but the ideas presented are interesting and I don't think the
article should be flagged.

To the author: If we agree that systems and institutions often include these
biases and might be correctly described as "sexist" then what can or should be
done in this particular case? It is probably possible to develop better
technology which handles all the factors involved in 3D vision, but if for
example a male researcher is testing a new VR system and he is biologically
predisposed to notice/optimize for certain factors, is it unreasonable to
expect that the finished product will work better for men than women on
average?

And is that not a good reason for more women to develop or help develop these
technologies?

~~~
detcader
People who have the chromosomes that correspond to the uterus and other
related reproductive parts should be described as "female" people. People who
have the chromosomes that correspond to the testes and other related
reproductive parts should be described as "male" people. People who have
chromosomes and reproductive parts that don't match classic sex dimorphic
binary (the thing that allows humans and other mammals to breed and evolve
over time) are called "intersex" by the medical community.

Queer Theorists have somewhat popularized the edgy notion that the above
knowledge is socially constructed (read: in people's heads as a collective
cultural meme) because, well, it sounds nice. A trend called Queer Politics
takes this idea like a new toy and says people who use terms like "female
biology" are bigoted. There is no need to cater to this temporal fashion
produced in academia, a thing that does observably nothing to help gender-
nonconforming people or explain the social forces that cause marginalization
and violence against them.

------
aaronem
[Preface: dang, thanks for overriding the flags on this HN posting. The
discussion thus far seems to be mostly worthwhile, unless it's gone to hell in
the twenty minutes or so I've just spent writing this comment, and I'm glad to
see it taking place here.]

boyd's baccalaureate thesis, of which her blog post appears to be a
recapitulation for a general audience, dates from 2000 and spends considerable
effort talking about how, for example, the lack of normal maps results in a
lack of shape-from-shading cues, which makes it difficult for a visual system
prioritizing those cues over parallax cues to develop a 3-space representation
of a scene.

And that's fair enough! _For 2000._ Now, though, a decade and a half later,
normal maps are ubiquitous in current-gen and next-gen 3D graphics; while it's
more computationally expensive to render with them than without them, the
Rift's resolution is only 1280x800 overall, and even with the added overhead
of parallax calculation, that's still easily within the capabilities of a
modern GPU.

This is the sort of thing one might expect to be addressed in boyd's
discussion of her earlier research. That said, having once read the thesis and
then gone back to review the blog post, it's quite plainly a simple
restatement of circa-2000 conclusions, and bears no trace of having been
updated in light of the enormous advances in graphical rendering technology
which have taken place between then and now.

I don't know whether there is any evidence of women having trouble with Rift-
induced simulator sickness at higher rates than men. Going by boyd's blog
post, I _can 't_ know, because she doesn't bother to mention whether there is
or there isn't; she just rehashes her earlier research and hangs "Oculus" and
"sexist" off it as search keywords.

This would be disappointing in general from someone reputed as highly as danah
boyd; much worse, though, it hamstrings her entire point! Her basic thesis, in
this blog post, is "This is a discussion we need to be having." But there's no
knowing whether that's true, because in comparison with modern rendering
technology, the research on which she bases that statement is hopelessly
outdated, and she presents no evidence to suggest that people who rely on
shading cues have the same problems with today's VR technology as with that of
fifteen years ago.

------
sliverstorm
_All too often, systems get shipped with discriminatory byproducts and people
throw their hands in the air and say, “oops, we didn’t intend that.”_

Is it just me, or is this kind of OK?

Intentional discrimination isn't, of course. But if your initial release
accidentally isn't accessible to people with blue-yellow colorblindness, is
that a tragedy of social justice?

No product serves every person equally, and this is especially true early in
the product's (or company's) lifetime. You're a little too busy tackling the
core problem to have time for fixing every accessibility problem in rev A.

Which seems OK to me. Rev A's are by nature lacking & incomplete, and I would
rather they get something out the door, make a profit, and decide to make a
rev B- than miss the boat and/or go bankrupt trying to make the product
equally accessible all from day 1.

There are plenty of products like that, that I have been unable to enjoy in
their early stages, so it isn't like getting the short end of the stick has
never happened to me. One of my favorite outdoor gear companies, for example,
has started making technical clothing. They don't offer sizes that fit tall,
slender me, so I'm pretty much hosed for now. But that's fine. They'll get to
it eventually.

(Obviously in this particular case wrt. Oculus Rift & women, the point has now
been raised and women are half the globe, so it would seem to be a high
priority to address. I'm just addressing the quoted statement, which was much
more general)

~~~
einhverfr
> Is it just me, or is this kind of OK?

For some values of "kind of." I would even go so far as to say on a practical
matter it may be worse than intentional discrimination.

Look, the problem is really one of intent and how well something matches
intent. If you want a combat flight simulator that you are marketing primarily
to young men, that's not necessarily a problem. If young women are less
interested in your product, you need to serve those who are going to actually
buy it.

But this works the other way too. If your target market is "everybody" then
inducing motion sickness in 52% of your target demographic is not "ok" from a
marketing perspective anymore than inducing seizures in the photosensitive
would be. You don't want possible customers to get sick from your product. So
on that level it isn't "kind of" ok.

This is an area where I actually think the less intentional discrimination,
the more problematic it becomes.

~~~
sliverstorm
Yes, it's clearly a big problem from a business/marketing/profits standpoint.
No question there, and I am 100% confident it will be addressed for exactly
that reason. I'm just talking about _socially_ , is this something we would
want to get Very Pissed Off About and break out our torches & pitchforks.

~~~
einhverfr
> is this something we would want to get Very Pissed Off About and break out
> our torches & pitchforks.

No disagreement. But again I am not sure that all defining target market as
young men ages 18 to 25 is necessarily problematic either. A lot of things
really depend heavily on details.

------
aamar
This article's definitions of "motion parallax" and "shape from shading" are
quite different from my understanding. Can anyone shed any light on this?
Specifically:

 _" Motion parallax has to do with the apparent size of an object. If you put
a soda can in front of you and then move it closer, it will get bigger in your
visual field. Your brain assumes that the can didn’t suddenly grow and
concludes that it’s just got closer to you."_

Whereas I believed "motion parallax" to be moving one's head so as to compare
an object's displacement against a more distant background. Size is
irrelevant.

 _" Shape-from-shading is a bit trickier. If you stare at a point on an object
in front of you and then move your head around, you’ll notice that the shading
of that point changes ever so slightly depending on the lighting around you.
The funny thing is that your eyes actually flicker constantly, recalculating
the tiny differences in shading, and your brain uses that information to judge
how far away the object is."_

"Shape from shading" I believed to be simply recreating a 3d structure from
the way light falls on it, a depth cue that occurs even without motion. The
quoted description seems like it is referring to specularity, which does play
a role in shape from shading, but also seems well handled by (many) rendering
engines.

~~~
jholman
My understanding of both of those terms agrees with yours.

I think in the case of "motion parallax" it's nearly the same, though....
whether you're "moving your head" or "moving the object", in both cases the
spatial relation of three things is changing: your Center of Projection, and
two other things (e.g. the two sides of a soda can, or e.g. a cloud and the
moon).

Now that I found someone to discuss the nerditude of detailed depth cues...
why on earth would eye-flickering change the shading? Am I supposed to believe
that it's because the CoP moves (because my pupil moves)? I find it
implausible that moving the CoP one millimeter, on an object that's 100mm to
10000mm from the CoP, while also changing which center-surround is processing
the photons from a point, can detect a difference in shading, even on highly
highly specular surfaces. Can anyone explain this to me?

~~~
PeterisP
Actually, as far as I've read, the minor eye movements happen exactly to
enable motion parallax (on the very edges of objects) even while the object is
static relating to you - so it's kind of completely opposite what the original
article was proposing.

------
shadowmint
It's a microscopic sample size, but with the OR developer kit I got to play
with, probably half women I know who tried it felt motion sick; the proportion
was much much lower for men (maybe 1/10).

At the time I simply put it down to the guys having played more FPS games and
being more accustomed to it, but its interesting to read this.

On the other hand, with the precise head tracking in OR, I wonder if a higher-
resolution with a better lighting model would make this issue go away?

It's basically just tiny head movements, right? As you move you see minor
shading differences in the scene, and use that to mentally reconstruct the 3D
geometry (as I understand it from the article).

You'd think high precision head tracking with a sufficiently high frame rate
would be able to catch that.

(however, the low res / poorly lit OR demos probably don't)

~~~
malandrew
Does the OR account for pupillary distance? At the 5th percentile, the
pupillary distance for women is 2mm smaller than men and at the 95th
percentile, it's a 5mm difference. With that in mind, an OR for women may need
to be designed to account for a smaller pupillary distance.

What about children? How likely are they to experience nausea? Anyone with
kids and an OR dev kit have anecdotal data here?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pupillary_distance](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pupillary_distance)

~~~
NoodleIncident
Yes, pretty sure that's configurable.

Many games don't, though. I know the TF2 Oculus Rift integration at one point
had a calibrator for that. Last I heard they were pushing for a standalone
calibrator that games could all pull info from, but I don't know what came of
that.

~~~
malandrew
Is this calibration common between users? i.e. is it likely that a girl using
an OR after a guy will calibrate the device for her pupillary distance?

------
ender7
Ugh, I wish we didn't need such a rage-baiting title to talk about this. I'm
not a huge fan of danah's methods [1], but then againit's hard to argue with
her results.

danah is right that her findings are not at all conclusive. I'm somewhat
doubtful that the root cause is what she suggests, but the problem itself
seems to be very real. I'm quite excited to see if we can find a solution, as
it may have broader-reaching effects. Could this allow people who get motion
sick even from 2D presentations to enjoy them sickness-free?

[1] Labeling a company and its engineers as sexist for not being aware of
certain, extremely obscure research is unfair to say the least. But, you know,
institutional and implicit biases in subconscious power structures etc. etc.

~~~
yummyfajitas
_Labeling a company and its engineers as sexist..._

She did not do this. She assigned a label L to X and then provided an explicit
definition of L. You are fallaciously taking an alternate definition of L from
a different context and acting as if she used that definition.

But I suppose misunderstandings like yours are the price of cheap clickbait.

~~~
ender7
The misunderstanding was not the price of the clickbait, it was the intention.
boyd does provide a very careful definition of sexism buried at the addenda to
her article, but that explanation did not appear with the original article
when it was published. boyd even admits this, saying that a more accurate
title would have been "Is Oculus Rift unintentionally discriminating on the
basis of sex?".

"Sexist" is an emotionally charged term, and when you use it out of context
the reader will assume its most common meaning, not the more academically
accurate one. boyd knew this and decided it was better to rile people up than
let her article go unnoticed. I can't even fault her, to be honest -- I just
don't like manipulative headlines (or writing in general), even when used for
a justified end.

------
devindotcom
Hmm. I'm at a loss to explain how hormones, in the retina of all places, would
affect perceptual cues that have been built up over years and years of use and
are in many ways hard coded into the many layers and blobs (yes, "blobs") of
visual cortex. I certainly can't rule it out, but it seems an unlikely
mechanism for me. The neural networks governing vision are a very powerful
combination of nature (some blobs fire only when there are edges of a certain
orientation, for instance) and nurture (motion parallax ties in closely with a
physical understanding of distance, proprioception, etc). The differences have
to be deeper, if you ask me. Men and women's brains are indeed different, in
ways we don't fully understand (this is an understatement), but there's a lot
of evidence that men have, if you will, a spaciality speciality.

I wonder if there's a whole proprioceptive feedback center that helps tally
your visual input with your movements, that's fed by androgens or otherwise
activated by male-dominated chemicals and structures.

However I'm also curious about controls for things like playing lots of games
when younger — we're only just now starting to see female gamers approach
males in proportion, and I'm not confident that near-equality is as near when
you look at 5, 10, 15 year olds. Especially games like FPSes with lots of 3D
movement and rectifying of a virtual space with the real one. Having grown up
with the motion of gaming, I think I'm less susceptible to VR sickness. I
don't have any data on this, of course, but I would be very interested to see
some.

~~~
hyperion2010
A just so story for you.

Historically male primates of the genus homo have been hunters, often
operating on terrain with features at various depths passed through on the go.
To construct an accurate representation of the the natural world and the
relative distances of objects it would thus be beneficial for the male retina
to spend more resources processing depth cues that arise from motion parallax
compared to women for who survival may not have depended on being able to
accurately discern distances of game moving through brush.

This story is just that, a story. But the biology underlying sexual dimorphism
of the visual system is definitely real and the fact that a sex hormone is
involved may not be surprising since if, for example, an androgen receptor is
expressed in a certain cell type in the retina and that cell type is in the
circuit for parallax depth perception and that receptor enhances the response
to differential parallax by say, depolarizing that specific cell type, then
only males will have that enhancement.

------
vilhelm_s
I don't understand what "[computers can't] simulate how that tiny, constant
flickering of your eyes affects the shading you perceive" refers to. How can
flicking your eyes affect the shading of objects?

In the linked paper[1], the shape-from-shading cue was just a static greyscale
gradient, with no eye-flicking. This seems like something that standard
computer graphics techniques can emulate easily.

Since the study was done in 1997, I could imagine that the environments they
were working with still contained lots of flat polygons. But the modern
Oculus-rift runs things like Doom III, where everything is smoothly shaded. So
to me it would seem that while the CAVE might have been "sexist", the Oculus
isn't anymore? (Of course, there are lots of other depth cues than shading and
parallax, and there could be sex differences about how those are prioritized
also, but the cited experiment did not study them.)

[1]
[http://www.danah.org/papers/sexvision.pdf?_ga=1.245737348.10...](http://www.danah.org/papers/sexvision.pdf?_ga=1.245737348.1002921219.1392507889)

------
dang
The title is linkbait, which is against the guidelines, but I can't think of a
better one. If any of you suggest one that's accurate and neutral, I'll change
it.

~~~
dsrguru
The thing is, the title isn't linkbait from the perspective of modern feminist
discourse and its usage of the word "sexist".

In radical feminism (the ideology that the term "feminism" most frequently
refers to in contemporary usage), virtually the entirety of human interaction
is viewed from the lens of the patriarchy model, the notion that society is
governed by "a system of power that organizes society into a complex of
relationships based on the assertion that male supremacy oppresses women"
(Wikipedia). Such feminists define any act as "sexist" if it reinforces, or
even if it is the product of, what they see as the patriarchy. Similarly,
liberal sociologists and critical race theorists define "racism" as the
characteristic of any action that results from the oppressive power the
dominant group (most contiguous with the class of straight white males, at
least in Western society) has over minorities. (This is why those on the far
left often make statements like "there's no such thing as reverse
racism/sexism." They're right based on their usage--it's just a matter of
definition.)

So anyway, when feminists use the term "sexist", they're not usually using it
in the colloquial sense of "you're a bad person" but rather in the sense of
"you're saying or doing something that results from the patriarchal society
that governed your upbringing, and it would be really good if you start
questioning the assumptions that led you to this action." In fact, I've heard
quite a few feminists describe an action of their own doing as "sexist" and
immediately set out to unlearn whatever caused them to say or do that. If only
more feminists were as open to entertaining discussion regarding alternatives
to their patriarchy hypothesis, but I digress!

~~~
dsrguru
Having attended a very left wing liberal arts college and, therefore, being
very familiar with the terminology used by sociologists, I intended the above
to be explanatory rather than either an advocacy of or an attack on the
leftist definition. Could some of the downvoters please explain which side
they're coming from and what aspect of my post they found problematic?

~~~
jkrems
I know I didn't upvote your comment because of:

> This is why those on the far left often make statements like "there's no
> such thing as reverse racism/sexism." They're right based on their usage--
> it's just a matter of definition.

Don't know enough about it but I think "there's no such thing as reverse
racism" is true because it would be just... racism. Or just sexism. Actually
the definition given before ("sexism is sexism by the privileged") would allow
for "reverse sexism" ("sexism by the non-privileged"). So it seemed kind of
inconsistent to me.

~~~
dsrguru
> Don't know enough about it but I think "there's no such thing as reverse
> racism" is true because it would be just... racism. Or just sexism. Actually
> the definition given before ("sexism is sexism by the privileged") would
> allow for "reverse sexism" ("sexism by the non-privileged"). So it seemed
> kind of inconsistent to me.

As I said in my original post, most feminists assert that society is a
patriarchy that is fundamentally oppressive to women. They use the term
"sexist" for an act that results from the patriarchy. Because their model of
power dynamics does not allow for the notion of males being structurally
oppressed, it is by their very definition impossible for one to be "sexist"
(or "reverse sexist" as some people say) towards males.

> I know I didn't upvote your comment because of:

I'm not sure I really follow. Are you saying that (1) you disliked that I
attempted to clarify that feminists use the term "sexist" differently from how
a lot of us use it or that (2) I didn't do a good job in making that
clarification or (3) something else entirely?

If the first or third, I don't get why. If the second, what I meant is that a
lot of commenters on this thread found the title misleading. I wanted to
clarify to them that there are two commonly used usages of "sexism", one in
mainstream English and one in academia, especially in left wing contexts. As a
linguist, I don't find value in prescribing one definition as "better" to use
than another. I just wanted to point out that people were really just having a
debate about definitions.

------
Oculus
The title of the blog/article almost ruined the whole point trying to be made.

I read the entire article waiting for justification of a clearly provocative
title. I got to the end, felt Danah Boyd didn't justify the title and felt the
blog/article was weak. Only when I took a step away and thought about the it
did I realize the reason I had such a bad taste in my mouth - it was the
title. The article itself brings up a good point and one that should be
explored by Oculus and others doing VR. I don't think anyone expected that men
and women would react different to VR or the techniques we use to render VR
worlds.

~~~
onewaystreet
The article is a good read with the assumption that Oculus is not aware of
these facts and is not trying to solve the problem she poses. The problem with
that assumption is that nowhere in article does she mention talking to anyone
at Oculus. She doesn't even mention if she has even used the Rift. For all we
know Oculus could be at the forefront of this issue. We don't know because she
didn't ask.

------
argumentum
Is Nature sexist? To maintain a consistent argument, the author would have to
answer yes.

Nature is many things, but fair is not one of them.

~~~
jkrems
From all I know about the period, I'm pretty sure no women would pretend that
nature treats men and women the same.

~~~
argumentum
Sure, but lumping all gender based unfairness under the label "sexism" muddles
things.

Businesses make money selling products for periods and pregnancy, because
females want them, not because of any "se ism". Similarly if it's true that
some people don't jive with the oculus rift, because of a _biological_
difference, Oculus can create a different device for that market.

They certainly shouldn't be charged with "sexism" or delay releasing their
product simply because it's better suited to males than females (if the
authors contentions hold).

------
doktrin
> _Motion parallax has to do with the apparent size of an object. If you put a
> soda can in front of you and then move it closer, it will get bigger in your
> visual field. Your brain assumes that the can didn’t suddenly grow and
> concludes that it’s just got closer to you._

> _Shape-from-shading is a bit trickier. If you stare at a point on an object
> in front of you and then move your head around, you’ll notice that the
> shading of that point changes ever so slightly depending on the lighting
> around you. The funny thing is that your eyes actually flicker constantly,
> recalculating the tiny differences in shading, and your brain uses that
> information to judge how far away the object is._

I need help understanding the mechanics here.

What exactly is the flicker described? What does it have to do with shading
being recalculated? If hypothetically our eyes did not flicker, how would that
affect our depth perception?

As a follow up - what would be involved in emulating this in a virtual system?

~~~
aaronem
[Edit: Removed discussion not relevant to parent's question for reposting as a
top-level comment.]

I've been assuming that this bit about "eye flickers" is boyd's way of
describing for a general audience the phenomenon of optical saccades, which
are automatic and very fast eyeball twitches which allow the brain to gather
enough information to construct a visual scene through an eyeball with a
(usually) very narrow area of focus.

I'm not sure how that affects shape-from-shading, though, because saccades are
movements of the eyeballs only, not of the head. Saccades therefore don't
affect angles of reflection or refraction, which would seem to make it
impossible for them to change the shading of a given scene.

~~~
acqq
The fact is that for VR to be accurate, we'd have to do very fast tracking of
the eye movement and even the change of the focus of the eye. Both are
certainly used by our brains to unconsciously calculate the distance of an
object. Both can happen independently of our head movements.

I can easily recognize that such adjustments of the picture aren't present in
immersive 3D projections. Add to that that we males are much less aware of the
incorrectness of the shades, it's easy for me to imagine that women have
bigger problems under given conditions.

------
peterhajas
This doesn't sound like the Oculus is sexist, so much as that men are more
predisposed to experience the 3D effect biologically. How is that sexist?

~~~
arrrg
Sexism as in discriminatory based on sex in some manner, not necessarily
intentionally or maliciously discriminatory. That is defined in the article
itself, by the way, so there isn’t really much to add here. Maybe I can help
make the point more explicit.

The hypothesis is that VR tech uses depth cues that work better for one sex
(seems the more appropriate term than gender in this case) than the other.
This would make the tech discriminatory, hence sexist as defined in the
article.

The important part is that sexism as defined in the article does not ascribe
intent or maliciousness to those who made the tech. It does not accuse those
who made the tech of being intentionally or maliciously sexist, it just
describes the tech as sexist. The author even makes it explicit that in her
opinion there is no intention at all to be sexist by those who made the tech,
no intention to make the tech work worse for women.

Now, some people who use the world sexist mean to strongly imply intention and
many people who read it understand it as assigning blame. However, that is not
necessarily how all people use the word. I certainly don’t use it that way and
I know many other people who don’t. These two uses of the word – one ascribing
intention, one not – is potentially confusing, so it’s good that she
explicitly defined the word in her article and explicitly excludes intent from
the definition.

You could argue that this is a very exotic use of the word. I can’t speak to
how common the different uses are, but I do know that for many people it has
long been important to divorce intent from effect because in many ways the
effect is the only thing that matters.

------
Pxl_Buzzard
Reading this article I'm not convinced this is the fault of the Rift. Motion
parallax happens naturally when a game engine uses two cameras to render a
scene (the 3D effect). Shape-from-shading is dependent on the lighting system
the engine uses, and because developers haven't needed to program for VR
they've never implemented it.

There are many changes in both game design and engine features that we'll
start to see as virtual reality becomes mainstream. It's very likely we'll see
a stall in graphics improvements as game engine programmers begin to enhance
other systems like physics and lighting to work more realistically.

~~~
jholman
I initially agreed. It really depends on how this purported shape-from-
shading-due-to-eye-flickering thing works. I don't at all understand danah's
claims about how eye flickering gives you extra data, and my first-principles
impulse is to say it sounds implausible to me... but supposing she's right,
depending on what she means, maybe eye trackers would be required to produce
proper depth cues. In which case it's a hardware problem too (though of course
the game engines would also be required to support it, blah blah).

------
callesgg
With her definition of sexist a bra, a urinal or anything that is only usable
by one gender is sexist.

Interesting data, strange conclusion.

------
hcarvalhoalves
> Motion parallax has to do with the apparent size of an object. If you put a
> soda can in front of you and then move it closer, it will get bigger in your
> visual field. Your brain assumes that the can didn’t suddenly grow and
> concludes that it’s just got closer to you.

While parallax does play a part in perception of size and distance, we still
perceive the size of objects without stereoscopy (that is, with one eye
closed, or on a flat image). When shown an upclose photo of a can, people can
figure out it didn't just grew because 1) we have previous knowledge of the
shape and size of a can and 2) it's image gets distorted as it gets closer
[1].

You can trick someone by making an object with an unfamiliar shape to look
familiar when viewed with the right angle / FOV [2]. Similarly, making
miniatures appear realistically-sized in photos involves careful FOV control
to not trigger the signals in our perception [3].

This is a mechanism that, I think, would be interesting to study w.r.t. gender
differences, more than rotating 3D objects.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perspective_distortion_(photogr...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perspective_distortion_\(photography\))

[2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_perspective#Forced_persp...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_perspective#Forced_perspective_in_architecture)

[3] [http://petapixel.com/2013/10/14/life-like-miniature-
scenes-s...](http://petapixel.com/2013/10/14/life-like-miniature-scenes-shot-
using-model-cars-forced-perspective-250-ps/)

------
zem
lousy title, but fascinating piece of research. please do go back and read it
if you skipped it due to the title.

------
pubby
So would having separate male and female versions of the Oculus be considered
more sexist or less sexist? No snark intended.

~~~
antimatter15
The article isn't really referring to the Oculus Rift in particular, so much
as the gender-linked nature of depth perception. That's an underlying
technological issue, and not something you can fix by dropping a few grams and
giving it a paint job.

It's a bit of a linkbait title, because it's quite misleading in that it
suggests (especially to the large fraction of people who read the title
without opening the article) that Oculus is engaging in some institutional
gender-discriminatory behavior (an amusing perhaps autoantonym is that an
equivalent title might be "Women don't use Oculus Rift, but it's not
sexist!").

Just as easily, the title could have been "Is Avatar sexist?" (I'm actually
really curious if 3D movies also induce nausea that differs in rate along
sex/hormonal lines, and I would have expected, given its mass-market nature).

From a pretty shallow search, I found
[http://www.pacificu.edu/vpi/publications/documents/OVS.3DVie...](http://www.pacificu.edu/vpi/publications/documents/OVS.3DViewing.Yangetal.pdf)
which claims that there isn't a link between gender and anything (nausea,
dizziness, disorientation, blurring were all found to not correlate) except
for "involvement in the movie".

------
dsugarman
CAVEs make me nauseous too, I'm a dude and I used to help build them

------
jbcurtin2
Being a man and an oculus tinkerer. How would I go about testing this?

~~~
gcb0
the whole thing is: in her preliminary study, people with more male-hormones
(layman term) identify depth by shapes in motion. people with less (or female-
hormones, again, very layman terms) get sick when there is no light hinting on
that 3d body movement.

You don't even need an oculus to test the hypothesis. it can probably be
tested by:

\- showing that spinning woman shadow that everyone sees spinning to a
different direction, see if women get sick/annoyed/react in any manner faster
than men. or;

\- put lots of people in a room with a hanging light as the only light source,
kick that light in a large pendulum movement. check if the women get sick
faster than the men.

~~~
knyt
The spinning woman mentioned above:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_Dancer](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_Dancer)

------
thefreeman
Pretty cool article / research. I kind of wish the author hadn't intentionally
brought sexism into it because I think the research is interesting enough on
its own and it just distracts from the actual information. She does address
this a bit at the end though.

------
Yaa101
The words Oculus Rift sound like a sexually transmitted disease, so who knows?

