From VentureBeat
With Vision Pro launched, companies must talk about XR, nausea and gender
By Wagner James Au
Avi-Bar Zeev has been designing virtual reality experiences for so long, he was involved in the first technical discussions around creating the Metaverse back in the 1990s at an early VR startup in Seattle, alongside Snow Crash author Neal Stephenson himself. Bar-Zeev’s expertise culminated most recently at Apple, where he was Senior Manager of Experience Prototyping for the Vision Pro.
No longer at Apple, he is now calling on companies in the XR industry to do something remarkable and unprecedented, because it largely remains a taboo topic: Reveal just how much their devices cause people to become nauseous in various headsets like the Quest 3 and Apple Vision Pro...
Shortly after, academic danah boyd (a senior researcher at Microsoft) published an essay, much-discussed back then, proactively entitled: “Is the Oculus Rift sexist?” In it, she recounted what happened when she herself excitedly tried out an early virtual reality room demo:
“I donned a set of goggles and jumped inside. And then I promptly vomited...”
danah boyd received her Ph.D. from the UC Berkeley School of Information and is the founder of the Data & Society Research Institute. She is also a researcher at Microsoft and a visiting professor at New York University.
