Here's an article whose contents I didn't really expect. (Oculus Rift is a virtual reality headset developed by a company recently acquired by Facebook).
a friend of mine stumbled over a footnote in an esoteric army report about simulator sickness in virtual environments. Sure enough, military researchers had noticed that women seemed to get sick at higher rates in simulators than men. While they seemed to be able to eventually adjust to the simulator, they would then get sick again when switching back into reality.
The woman writing the article speaks of further investigations into this:
Scholars in the gender clinic were doing fascinating research on tasks like spatial rotation skills. They found that people taking androgens (a steroid hormone similar to testosterone) improved at tasks that required them to rotate Tetris-like shapes in their mind to determine if one shape was simply a rotation of another shape. Meanwhile, male-to-female transsexuals saw a decline in performance during their hormone replacement therapy.
Along the way, I also learned that there are more sex hormones on the retina than in anywhere else in the body except for the gonads.
That last sentence (highlighting mine) was one I found particularly surprising. It seems there are different clues that men and women use for depth perception that seems to result in women being more likely to lose their lunch in current 3D simulators:
What I found was startling (pdf). Although there was variability across the board, biological men were significantly more likely to prioritize motion parallax. Biological women relied more heavily on shape-from-shading. In other words, men are more likely to use the cues that 3D virtual reality systems relied on.
In other words, there seems to be a biological, hormonal element here.
