A meta-analysis of the virtual reality problem: Unequal effects of virtual reality sickness across individual differences

Practical applications of virtual reality (VR), defined as a three-dimensional digital representation of a real or imagined space, have become increasingly popular and are now applied in workplace training, physical rehabilitation, psychological therapy, and many other settings. Feelings akin to motion sickness, called VR sickness, can arise from interacting with VR programs, and researchers have shown that certain aspects of the user, such as gender and age, may predict the occurrence of VR sickness. The unequal effects of VR sickness are a dire concern and the application of VR is unfair to certain users if they are prone to sickness. For instance, a workplace VR training program could result in disparate treatment if women experience more VR sickness than men. To investigate this notion, we perform a meta-analysis on the relationship between VR sickness and a wide array of potential antecedents. The results demonstrate that motion sickness susceptibility, gender, real-world experience, technological experience, possessing a neurological disorder, and possessing a relevant phobia all significantly relate to VR sickness; however, no moderating effects produced recurrent significant results. These results were partially explained by the current dominant framework for VR sickness, postural instability theory, but some findings were not predicted by the theory. Therefore, we support that (a) VR sickness produces unequal effects across multiple individual differences; (b) these effects appear resilient across applications of VR programs, and (c) further research is needed to develop theory and identify explanatory mechanisms that detail these relationships.