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When Worlds Collide  

Challenges and Opportunities in Virtual Reality 
Olivia Y. Lee, Stanford University ’24 

  
 
Abstract:The field of virtual reality (VR) has advanced significantly in the last decade. VR 
technologies have the unique capability of creating immersive virtual experiences that can 
amplify both positive and negative human behaviors. It is important that we consider the design 
decisions behind VR technology to leverage VR’s capabilities to promote social and gender 
equality rather than hinder it. Two main challenges have been identified in modern day VR 
technology: first, immersive VR applications promote harassment towards women, racial 
minorities, and LGBTQ+ individuals, and second, VR hardware is better suited to males than 
females. Analyzing VR technology design using sex and gender analysis can significantly 
improve VR experiences for a wider audience, enabling us to leverage VR’s uniquely immersive 
capabilities to facilitate social equality. Two gendered innovations can address these challenges: 
first, VR applications can help develop empathy towards traditionally marginalized communities, 
and second VR headsets can be more sex-inclusive. 
 
Content Warning: This article contains sensitive content, including anecdotes relating to sexual 
harassment, and analyses of discriminatory behavior against women, racial minorities, and 
LGBTQ+ individuals. Readers are advised to take these into account before proceeding. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

In October 2016, a visceral account of online sexual harassment shook the Internet. A 
female gamer, under the pseudonym Jordan Belamire, detailed her experience being groped in the 
virtual reality (VR) game QuiVR (Belamire, 2016). At first, she was enthralled by the virtual world 



and described herself walking off the game’s highest tower despite her fear of heights: “I didn’t 
fall, and I was walking on air. I was a god.” (Belamire, 2016). However, within minutes of 
activating QuiVR’s multiplayer mode, everything changed. A player with the username 
BigBro442 entered the game, and upon hearing Belamire’s voice, “[h]is floating hand approached 
my body, and he started to virtually rub my chest.” (Belamire, 2016). Despite Belamire’s cries for 
him to stop, BigBro442’s avatar continued to grab and pinch her chest, and even rub her virtual 
crotch. Just like that, Belamire’s feelings of invincibility quickly turned to helplessness, “from the 
god who couldn’t fall off a ledge to a powerless woman being chased by an avatar named 
BigBro442” (Belamire, 2016). Feeling shocked and violated, Belamire noted her brother-in-law 
had played multiplayer VR games numerous times without issues, but her female voice almost 
instantly elicited harassment. 
 Belamire is not alone in having problematic experiences with VR. While her encounter 
pertained to applications developed on VR hardware, others have also reported negative 
experiences with the VR hardware itself. danah boyd (stylized in lowercase) (boyd, n.d.), a female 
computer graphics programmer and researcher at Microsoft, described her first experience with 
3D immersive technologies in 1997 (boyd, 2016). Her excitement about being immersed in the 
Metaverse, the virtual world imagined in Neal Stevenson’s Snow Crash, soon gave way to nausea, 
causing her to vomit. Her female peers had similar physical reactions, while her male colleagues 
had no problems with the system. Though VR technology has improved leaps and bounds since 
then, boyd’s research has revealed nausea and simulator sickness in VR are still prevalent, more 
so amongst females than males (boyd, 2000). Unfortunately, despite significant investment and 
advancements in recent years, VR technology still creates a comparatively negative experience 
for half the population. 
 Taken together, these accounts illustrate two main challenges in VR technology: first, 
immersive VR applications promote harassment towards women, racial minorities, and LGBTQ+ 
individuals, and second, VR hardware is currently better suited to males than females. Analyzing 
VR technology design using sex and gender analysis can significantly improve VR experiences 
for a wider audience, enabling us to leverage VR’s uniquely immersive capabilities to promote 
social equality. Two gendered innovations can address these challenges: first, VR applications 
can help develop empathy towards traditionally marginalized communities, and second VR 
headsets can be more sex-inclusive. 
 This paper first explores VR software applications that contain discriminatory content and 
promote harassment behaviors towards historically underrepresented communities. Using gender 
as an analytical framework for VR software innovation processes facilitates reframing VR 
applications to promote gender and social equality. Next, this paper confronts design choices in 
VR hardware that tend to exclude females. Utilizing sex as a lens to analyze these biases, a better 
sex balance in research participants is needed to rethink reference models for VR hardware, 
leading to more sex-sensitive VR headsets. Finally, this paper concludes by highlighting the 
interactions between VR software and hardware, emphasizing that improving both elements in 
parallel is essential in making the technology more inclusive. 



 
Addressing Discriminatory Content and Behavior in VR Applications 
 VR applications hinder gender and social equality by including discriminatory content and 
facilitating harassment behaviors. Research studies have demonstrated video games, especially 
interactive role-playing games, promote online harassment (Tang et al., 2019) and physical sexual 
violence towards women (Afaq et al., 2019), attributable to both the video games’ content and 
the harmful behavior they elicit (Gutiérrez, 2014). Such video games also facilitate discrimination 
against minorities and LGBTQ+ individuals: 53% of individuals harassed in video games were 
discriminated against based on their racial identity, and among LGBTQ+ players, 35% were 
targeted for their sexual orientation or gender identity (“Free to Play?”, 2019). Other studies have 
found VR leads to greater presence (Lemmens et al., 2021) (Pallavicini et al., 2019) and more 
intense negative emotional expression (Lavoie et al., 2020) than screen-based, non-immersive 
video games. While research into discrimination in VR applications is nascent (“Fast rise in social 
virtual reality”, 2021), these trends collectively suggest VR applications, especially social VR, 
may facilitate harmful behaviors more traumatic than those on traditional platforms. Even in this 
early stage, disturbing VR games have already been released allowing players to sexually assault 
women (Buxton, 2016) or containing racist and sexist elements (Feltham, 2021). Female gamers, 
like Belamire, have also reported harassment encounters in VR environments (Buchleitner, 2018) 
(Westervelt, 2016). The decisions behind VR application content and design will be influential 
in ensuring the field moves towards gender and social equality.  
 The potential for women, racial minorities, and LGBTQ+ individuals to experience 
harassment through VR applications indicates concepts such as gender, sexual orientation, and 
race should be integrated into engineering innovation processes behind VR technology. Several 
problematic VR applications mentioned above are designed for white, cisgender, and 
heterosexual males as the target audience. Such applications may reinforce gender and racial 
stereotypes or simulate violent behaviors unacceptable in real-world contexts. This may have 
dangerous spillover effects into how players interact with others in social VR, or how they behave 
in the real world. Analyzing assumptions about gender, race, and sexuality embedded in these 
applications can facilitate designing virtual spaces that are not only inclusive, but also actively 
promote social equality, rather than perpetuate stereotypes. 
 Potential solutions to address discriminatory content and behavior in VR technology may 
involve engineering VR applications that develop empathy towards traditionally marginalized 
communities. A necessary first step is to cultivate a diverse VR developer community, so 
communities that get less visibility in VR applications are adequately and authentically 
represented. White male producers dominate VR application development, and their innovations 
feature a similarly homogeneous demographic (“The lack of female representation in VR,” 2016; 
Winston, 2020; De Leon, 2020). They even dominate in producing VR content intended to 
represent women and racial minorities (Nakamura, 2020), creating a spurious empathy for white 
viewers, and potentially misrepresenting these communities. At the first ever Black VR Creators 
event, the panel speakers unanimously agreed that hiring and mentoring more aspiring Black VR 



developers are crucial to improving representation in the space (Winston, 2020). Similar 
arguments can be made for women and LGBTQ+ individuals. While authentic representation 
should not be a responsibility that falls solely on underrepresented groups, communities like 
Women in VR (“WiVR: About Us”, n.d.) and Black VR Creators (Winston, 2020) indicate 
developers in these groups want to be more involved in content creation. Hence, having VR 
content creators from diverse backgrounds can help appropriately represent individuals from 
across different genders, sexualities, and racial identities.  
 Beyond workforce representation, VR content can be developed to challenge stereotypes 
and help develop empathy towards women, racial minorities, and LGBTQ+ individuals. 
Immersive VR provides the unique opportunity for embodiment, which can promote 
identification and empathy towards traditionally marginalized groups. Neyret et al. (2020) placed 
male participants in a VR scenario where a woman is sexually harassed by several men. 
Participants who embodied a man and a woman empathized with the woman more than those 
who only embodied a man. Banakou et al. (2016) conducted a similar study with White people 
embodying an African American virtual body, and virtual embodiment led to a sustained 
reduction in implicit racial bias against African Americans. VR applications have also been 
developed to enhance empathy for LGBTQ+ individuals, allowing users to interact with 
LGBTQ+ narratives in VR (“Gather around a virtual campfire,” 2018) and caregivers to undergo 
immersive training to care for elderly LGBTQ+ adults (“New Virtual Reality Immersive 
Learning Lab,” 2020). Besides developing empathy through embodiment, VR applications can 
challenge stereotypes by immersing users in situations that reveal and correct implicit biases. 
Such approaches have been used in various settings, from de-escalation training in law 
enforcement (Kim, 2018) to reducing gender and racial bias in classrooms (Gordon, 2020). The 
latter approach yielded statistically significant correlations between users’ empathy towards 
female and minority students and their awareness of implicit biases. These examples illustrate 
how VR applications provide valuable feedback to individuals about their internalized biases to 
overcome deep-rooted stereotypes about gender, sexuality, and race. 
 Overall, leveraging VR’s unique capability to provide embodiment and simulate 
immersive interactions can challenge implicit biases and develop empathy towards women, racial 
minorities, and LGBTQ+ individuals. Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab director Jeremy 
Bailenson believes immersive VR technology “takes the cognitive effort out of” perspective-taking 
exercises employed to build empathy (“How Experiencing Discrimination in VR,” 2018). That 
said, whether VR can enable effective perspective taking is highly contingent on how immersive 
it is. The ability to establish a strong presence where users “feel like they are there” is crucial for 
them to genuinely adopt the perspective simulated by VR technology. Ill-fitting VR hardware may 
create overwhelmingly negative physical sensations like what boyd experienced, hindering users 
from gaining deeper insights and causing this solution to ultimately lose its efficacy. It is essential 
for improvements to VR hardware and software to be made in parallel, with the overarching goal 
to increase inclusivity in VR technology. 
 



Addressing Sex-Based Biases in VR Hardware 
 Sex-based biases exist in modern VR hardware, specifically in VR head-mounted display 
(HMD) design. This section focuses on sex as a binary, as current research primarily analyzes 
differing experiences between males and females when using VR hardware. Further research 
beyond sex-based differences and outside of the binary is necessary to ensure VR hardware fits 
people from a variety of backgrounds, especially individuals from historically marginalized 
groups.  
 In one study, females and males used the popular Oculus Rift DK-1 and DK-2 HMDs to 
play the game Minecraft (Shafer et al., 2017). They were asked to complete the Simulator 
Sickness Questionnaire (Kennedy et al., 1993) after twenty minutes of gameplay. For both 
HMDs, females experienced more severe cybersickness symptoms than men, with negligible 
improvement from the older HMD to the newer version. In Grassini et al. (2021), females also 
reported more severe nausea-related simulator sickness than males using the Oculus GO HMD. 
Recent research has discovered interpupillary distance (IPD) non-fit is the primary reason for 
differences in cybersickness symptoms (Stanney et al., 2020). Substantially more females cannot 
achieve a good fit to their IPD with modern VR HMDs. Fulvio et al. (2021) found the average 
male’s IPD is 63.7mm, which closely matches the Oculus Rift DK-2’s default IPD of 64mm. 
However, the average female’s IPD is 59.4mm, and approximately 90% of females have pupils 
closer together than the default headset setting. Furthermore, 27% of females have an IPD beyond 
the adjustable IPD range, as compared to only 5% of men. Using the incorrect IPD setting 
introduces conflicts in the visual cues specifying object motion. These conflicts contribute to 
cybersickness, and evidently, such occurrences are much more likely for females.  
 The disparities in the experiences using VR HMDs between males and females suggest sex 
differences should be considered more thoroughly when developing VR technology prototypes. 
Fulvio et al. (2021) makes clear that VR HMD design choices – both the default IPD setting and 
adjustability range – are geared towards the average male. From the empirical studies cited above, 
one can infer the participants involved in preliminary research leading to these design choices 
were likely predominantly male. Research teams should ensure a better sex balance in research 
participants to determine the appropriate default IPD setting and adjustability range for males and 
females separately. Companies developing VR hardware can then create more equitable 
technology by rethinking the standard reference models for their products. This will likely require 
having two reference models for prototype testing – one for males and one for females – 
accounting for the difference in average IPD between sexes.  
 Considering these analyses, developing more sex-sensitive VR HMDs can address these 
biases. This could mean VR HMDs are engineered to have a wider IPD adjustability range that 
accommodates more females (ideally a similar percentage to males). Alternatively, if hardware 
constraints prevent the adjustability range from being sufficiently large, separate VR HMDs can 
be developed with a narrower default IPD setting and the appropriate adjustability range for 
females, which should both be determined through additional research. To avoid further 
perpetuating gender assumptions, the headsets should be identical in aesthetic design and 



differentiated using gender-neutral terms like “small”, “medium”, and “large”, rather than “male” 
and “female.” According to Stanney et al. (2020), if an individual’s IPD is properly fit to VR 
HMDs, sex differences in cybersickness are not expected. For both sexes, participants whose IPD 
matched the HMD experienced similar degrees of cybersickness and recovered from any adverse 
effects from VR exposure within one-hour post-exposure. However, females whose IPD did not 
fit the HMD (there were no males in the study whose IPD did not fit the HMD) experienced more 
severe cybersickness and could not recover within the same period. Therefore, developing VR 
HMDs with hardware specifications tailored to fit female IPDs can significantly improve their 
experience by reducing or eliminating cybersickness symptoms. 
 While this solution is an important step towards more equitable VR technology, 
improvements in VR hardware to fit females will have little benefit if the software applications 
developed on VR hardware are not similarly inclusive. According to Grassini et al. (2021), 
females experience a stronger presence – the subjective psychological sense of “being there” – 
than males when using VR applications. This is especially important when considering the 
heightened emotional impact VR experiences have on females than males. As seen in Belamire’s 
harassment experience playing the multiplayer QuiVR game, VR’s unique immersive quality 
amplifies psychological harm associated with such experiences compared to other non-immersive 
mediums. VR applications should be developed to promote gender and social equality, alongside 
improvements in VR hardware, to make VR technology inclusive to a wider audience. 
 
Conclusion and Future Work 
 This paper analyzes two challenges with VR technology and explores two gendered 
innovations to address them. Firstly, immersive VR applications contain discriminatory content 
and promote harassment behaviors, particularly towards women, racial minorities, and LGBTQ+ 
individuals. Analyzing assumptions about gender, sexuality, and race embedded in these 
applications can help improve the engineering processes used to develop them. By leveraging 
VR’s uniquely immersive capabilities, VR technology can promote social and gender equality by 
increasing representation, challenging stereotypes, and developing empathy towards traditionally 
marginalized communities. Secondly, sex-based biases in VR hardware result in headsets being 
better suited to males than females. Companies developing VR hardware should revise their 
standard reference models by improving the sex balance in participatory research processes 
contributing to their product design. This enables companies to develop more sex-sensitive VR 
headsets that fit females’ interpupillary distance. Ultimately, improvements to VR software and 
hardware must occur in parallel to create equitable, inclusive technology for a diverse user base. 
 Regarding next steps, research into VR’s emotional and psychological impact, specifically 
social VR, is a largely underexplored area (“Fast rise in social virtual reality,” 2021). Within this 
relatively small research pool, minority race and LGBTQ+ individuals’ experiences in immersive 
social VR environments are understudied compared to women’s experiences on these platforms. 
Through balanced participatory research, researchers should study the effects VR applications 
have on traditionally marginalized groups. These research findings can help reduce barriers and 



create opportunities for underserved communities. In addition, employing a diverse participant 
pool in VR hardware testing can help develop inclusive hardware. For instance, gender-diverse 
individuals, intersex individuals, children, and people with physical disabilities may require 
different specifications to achieve a good fit with VR devices. Despite its numerous benefits, VR 
is a not a silver-bullet solution to improving equity and inclusion, and additional research will be 
critical in ensuring VR can effectively achieve these goals. 
 Indeed, VR technologies have great potential to revolutionize how humans live, work, and 
interact. However, they are ultimately products of our own creation, which means they are not 
immune to the biases and stereotypes pervading our society. As VR creates a uniquely immersive 
virtual experience that can amplify both positive and negative human behaviors, VR design 
decisions should leverage the technology’s capabilities to promote inclusivity and equity, 
especially for historically underrepresented communities. Analyzing assumptions about sex, 
gender, and race will help VR developers identify and correct stereotypes posing barriers for 
marginalized groups. As VR technologies continue to gain widespread adoption, research and 
innovation cognizant of sex, gender, and race is essential to move the field in this direction. We 
must integrate these paradigms that fundamentally shape our world into VR development, so 
VR’s positive potential can be fully realized in the future.  



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