Demographic and Behavioral Correlates of Cybersickness: A Large Lab-in-the-Field Study of 837 Participants

Gender differences in cybersickness: Clarifying confusion and identifying paths forward

“…These studies offer especially good estimates of cybersickness experienced by men and women. Although this literature search was not done systematically, several larger studies (sample sizes ranging from 136 -1102) support the finding that women experience greater cybersickness than men [10,28,41,42,44,45].…”

“…It has been established that cybersickness can be reduced through repeated exposure to VR [1,19,34], referred to as adaptation. In a recent study with a very large participant sample (n = 837; [28]), VR experience was negatively related to cybersickness, although the relationship was modest (r = -.15). Given that men participate in VR at a higher rate than do women [22], it is possible that VR experience mediates some portion of the gender difference in cybersickness, although we know of no formal mediation analysis on this topic.…”

“…The only truly quantitative meta-analysis on the topic [18] puts the effect size at r = .21. Two studies with very large sample sizes put the effect size at r = .28 (n = 837, [28]) and r = .13 (n = 1102, [45]). All of these estimates fall into the small-to-medium range of effect sizes [9].…”

“…Susceptibility to other forms of motion sickness (e.g., car sickness or screen-induced motion sickness) has been identified as a potential mediator of cybersickness [28,36,44,45]. Women report experiencing greater motion sickness than do men [16,25,45].…”

“…Examples of stimulus-based factors that affect sickness include the content (e.g., games, 3D videos [38]), the locomotion interface (e.g., joystick, teleporting [6,8,27,51]), exposure duration [45], and task workload [40]. Examples of individual factors include prior VR experience [10,19,28], motion sickness history [10,25,45], and gender 1 [10,28,45].…”