No.841
Is the Oculus Rift sexist?
qz.com/192874/is-the-oculus-rift-designed-to-be-sexist/
In the fall of 1997, my university built a CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment) to help scientists, artists, and archeologists embrace 3D immersion to advance the state of those fields. Ecstatic at seeing a real-life instantiation of the Metaverse, the virtual world imagined in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, I donned a set of goggles and jumped inside. And then I promptly vomited.
No.842
I never managed to overcome my nausea. I couldn’t last more than a minute in that CAVE and I still can’t watch an IMAX movie. Looking around me, I started to notice something. By and large, my male friends and colleagues had no problem with these systems. My female peers, on the other hand, turned green.
No.843
What made this peculiar was that we were all computer graphics programmers. We could all render a 3D scene with ease. But when asked to do basic tasks like jump from Point A to Point B in a Nintendo 64 game, I watched my female friends fall short. What could explain this?
No.844
At the time any notion that there might be biological differences underpinning computing systems was deemed heretical. Discussions of gender and computing centered around services like Purple Moon, a software company trying to entice girls into gaming and computing. And yet, what I was seeing gnawed at me.
No.845
File: 1426747051016.png (303.45 KB, 672x386, 336:193, スクリーンショット 2014-09-10 0.37.….png)
That’s when 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.
No.846
Being an activist and a troublemaker, I walked straight into the office of the head CAVE researcher and declared the CAVE sexist. He turned to me and said: “Prove it.”
No.847
The gender mystery
Over the next few years, I embarked on one of the strangest cross-disciplinary projects I’ve ever worked on. I ended up in a gender clinic in Utrecht, in the Netherlands, interviewing both male-to-female and female-to-male transsexuals as they began hormone therapy. Many reported experiencing strange visual side effects. Like adolescents going through puberty, they’d reach for doors—only to miss the door knob. But unlike adolescents, the length of their arms wasn’t changing—only their hormonal composition.
No.848
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.
No.849
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. Studies on macular degeneration showed that hormone levels mattered for the retina. But why? And why would people undergoing hormonal transitions struggle with basic depth-based tasks?
No.850
Two kinds of depth perception
Back in the US, I started running visual psychology experiments. I created artificial situations where different basic depth cues—the kinds of information we pick up that tell us how far away an object is—could be put into conflict. As the work proceeded, I narrowed in on two key depth cues – “motion parallax” and “shape-from-shading.”
Motion parallax has to do with the apparent size of an object. If you put a soda can in front of you and then move it closer, it will get bigger in your visual field. Your brain assumes that the can didn’t suddenly grow and concludes that it’s just got closer to you.
No.851
Shape-from-shading is a bit trickier. If you stare at a point on an object in front of you and then move your head around, you’ll notice that the shading of that point changes ever so slightly depending on the lighting around you. The funny thing is that your eyes actually flicker constantly, recalculating the tiny differences in shading, and your brain uses that information to judge how far away the object is.
In the real world, both these cues work together to give you a sense of depth. But in virtual reality systems, they’re not treated equally.
No.852
The virtual-reality shortcut
When you enter a 3D immersive environment, the computer tries to calculate where your eyes are at in order to show you how the scene should look from that position. Binocular systems calculate slightly different images for your right and left eyes. And really good systems, like good glasses, will assess not just where your eye is, but where your retina is, and make the computation more precise.
No.853
It’s super easy — if you determine the focal point and do your linear matrix transformations accurately, which for a computer is a piece of cake — to render motion parallax properly. Shape-from-shading is a different beast. Although techniques for shading 3D models have greatly improved over the last two decades — a computer can now render an object as if it were lit by a complex collection of light sources of all shapes and colors — what they they can’t do is simulate how that tiny, constant flickering of your eyes affects the shading you perceive. As a result, 3D graphics does a terrible job of truly emulating shape-from-shading.
No.854
Tricks of the light
In my experiment, I tried to trick people’s brains. I created scenarios in which motion parallax suggested an object was at one distance, and shape-from-shading suggested it was further away or closer. The idea was to see which of these conflicting depth cues the brain would prioritize. (The brain prioritizes between conflicting cues all the time; for example, if you hold out your finger and stare at it through one eye and then the other, it will appear to be in different positions, but if you look at it through both eyes, it will be on the side of your “dominant” eye.)
No.855
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.
No.856
This, if broadly true, would explain why I, being a woman, vomited in the CAVE: My brain simply wasn’t picking up on signals the system was trying to send me about where objects were, and this made me disoriented.
My guess is that this has to do with the level of hormones in my system. If that’s true, someone undergoing hormone replacement therapy, like the people in the Utrecht gender clinic, would start to prioritize a different cue as their therapy progressed.
No.857
We need more research
However, I never did go back to the clinic to find out. The problem with this type of research is that you’re never really sure of your findings until they can be reproduced. A lot more work is needed to understand what I saw in those experiments. It’s quite possible that I wasn’t accounting for other variables that could explain the differences I was seeing. And there are certainly limitations to doing vision experiments with college-aged students in a field whose foundational studies are based almost exclusively on doing studies solely with college-age males. But what I saw among my friends, what I heard from transsexual individuals, and what I observed in my simple experiment led me to believe that we need to know more about this.
No.858
I’m excited to see Facebook invest in Oculus, the maker of the Rift headset. No one is better poised to implement Stephenson’s vision. But if we’re going to see serious investments in building the Metaverse, there are questions to be asked. I’d posit that the problems of nausea and simulator sickness that many people report when using VR headsets go deeper than pixel persistence and latency rates.
No.859
What I want to know, and what I hope someone will help me discover, is whether or not biology plays a fundamental role in shaping people’s experience with immersive virtual reality. In other words, are systems like Oculus fundamentally (if inadvertently) sexist in their design?
Follow danah on Twitter @zephoria. We welcome your feedback at ideas@qz.com.
No.861
 | Rolled 21 (1d99) |
nice post op, thanks for sharing..
interesting article, soecially the part about the two kinds of depth perception
>>850what i did not like was how the author tried to push sexism in it with that clickbait title; nonetheIess, she seems to have done a bit of research, and made the article informative, rather than a sperg rant, which is nice
also, nice pics
No.2414
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/15/anti_robot_prostitution_campaign/
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34118482
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/09/15/having-sex-with-robots-is-really-really-bad-campaign-against-sex-robots-says/
>Dr Kathleen Richardson
>robot ethicist
"I started thinking, "Oh, no, something needs to be said about this. This is not right.'"
"It’s a new and emerging technology, but let’s nip in the bud."
Asked whether it it might be more appropriate to consider robo-whores as sex toys, which would most typically be considered a private and solitary part of human sexual activity, Richardson stressed the opposite.
"To call them toys is to understate the issue," she said. "It's not as if it's a Barbie." Dr Richardson also surprisingly offered the idea that there may be some form of exploitation involved in the manufacture of My Little Pony dolls.
"The better term is 'sex object'," said Dr Richardson, who emphasised that the objectification of prostitutes in the prostitute/john relationship is one that's mimicked in the relationship between sex-robots and their owners.
Questioned whether objectification was worthy of concern when actual objects were involved, rather than people who were treated like objects, Richardson turned away from the actual issue of banning robots - stating again that sex toys, and sex robots, exist because of prostitution.
"We must abolish prostitution," she said.
"80 per cent of women are prostitutes," she added, but confirmed that actually she had meant that the other way round. The remaining 20 per cent she suggested were made up of children and transgendered men.
She hopes that the campaign will "encourage computer scientists and roboticists to refuse to contribute to the development of sex robots as a field by refusing to provide code, hardware or ideas" as well as working with campaigns against the sexual exploitation of humans.
No.2447
>>855
>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.
Makes sense from hunter-gatherer perspective, men who were better at determining how deer and other shit ran around were more likely to throw a javelin at them and thus passed their good hunter genes onwards, and women who were better at figuring out if this shape and colour of a fruit or mushroom was healthy were more likely to pass on their gatherer genes.
No.2481
I GOTTA ROL THE DIE. I GOOTTTA PLAY THE ODDS. I GOTTA SEE DEM SNAKE EYES STARIN MY BACK SO I KNOW THAT I RELLY LIVED LIKE A STAR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
No.2482
What's sexist is deleting my porn thread instead of unsticking it. Didn't know you cared more about women than one of your own users. Id never delete one of your shitty fusty threads or "help our board is in danger we have to migrate to 4chan threads
No.2497
No.2498
>>2497
Fucking feminists, man. Can't they just leave us with our waifus in peace?
The day of the rope draws ever nearer, my brothers.