I drew up my list of Best and Worst for 2021 and to make it balanced, it has 3 on each side. Here we go:
Best
I count meeting Sriya as a golden moment of 2021. I actually haven’t had long chats with her. But I was given a small heads-up for a student XR conference that I was supporting that a speaker was coming that was going to be amazing. I think the ‘knock socks off‘ phrase might have been used. I was under FERPA regulations to know that she needed extra protection at the conference and I volunteered to give it. That means I stood on the virtual stage with her, playing the role of direct tech support but also crowd control if necessary.
But what did happen meant something much more to me.
Sriya gave her presentation. It was a great topic and very forward looking. Then, she took questions from the audience. Because the topic was on brain-computer interfaces (BCI), it didn’t take long before questions of invasion of privacy questions came from what were obviously professors in the audience.
I’ve seen these verbal examinations before. I’ve seen them break college seniors and Master’s Degree students. It’s just enough questioning to find where the student does not know the answer. That’s the push point. Several men in the audience were going right for her, directly and academically.
Standing on stage with her, without her knowing it, I would have thrown up a shield if she needed it and blocked those men from getting to her/embarrass her/humiliate her by making some excuse that we’d run out of time, audio wasn’t working, etc.
But, she held the stage. She held her ground. More than once she said “The data doesn’t say.”
Good line! Don’t let them pin you where you have not staked a claim. She’d been trained well to enter an academic fight.
When she was done, I let out my breath.
Were those men plants in the audience? Not sure. Maybe. Either way, my hackles were real.
And the lesson for me that day was: if I can do anything to help women like Sriya…even if it is only shouting “Make a path!“, I will. It’s very hard to be a woman in the technological sciences. The road ahead will shape her in ways I’m sorry to contemplate. May she always find a woman like me standing by, ready to help.
Please follow her. Great things are ahead.
2. A small unheralded research paper, HMD Type and Spatial Ability: Effects on the Experiences and Learning
of Students in Immersive Virtual Field Trips.
I was able to meet the first author, Pejman Sajjadi, at the IEEE VR conference in March/April 2021 in avatar form here. This small piece of research stayed in my mind all year as a great example of the piecemeal way that scientific research works its way slowly towards practitioners and teachers.
The write up of this study is pay walled behind IEEE, I believe, and Pejman would be the first to point out the small sample size. Therefore, there was no fanfare and no social media on this paper. If you look at his research background, what you see is this paper is just one of several papers generated from one research event, so it’s pretty generic par-for-the-course research.
Taking into account all those discount factors, this tiny study investigated something that teachers do really want to know:
Are expensive VR headsets worth it?
The answer is no.
There is much more to the no, of course, related to content, learning objectives, scalability, etc. But more so than ever in 2021, educators turned to VR as a more realistic mainstream learning choice. The price drop of the Oculus Quest 2 to $299 and further, the Facebook push for the work use of Workrooms to bring VR use directly into the workplace show that we are going to have to get more and more comfortable with VR headsets and quality will be a question.
(Image source: https://about.fb.com/news/2021/08/introducing-horizon-workrooms-remote-collaboration-reimagined/)
Quietly researched, small sample size, no social media presence.
But bit by bit, researchers are answering these questions. I hope teachers are listening to the work of Pejman.
P. Sajjadi, J. Zhao, J. O. Wallgrün, P. C. La Femina and A. Klippel,
“HMD Type and Spatial Ability: Effects on the Experiences and Learning
of Students in Immersive Virtual Field Trips,” 2021 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops (VRW), 2021, pp. 546-547, doi: 10.1109/VRW52623.2021.00155. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9419337
3. Equal Entry and XR Women
It’s a tie! Both organizations work for similar goals:
- Equal Entry has a strong drive for accessibility and has a section of work dedicated just for VR, AR, and XR.
- XR Women‘s mission is dedicated to getting women’s voices up on stage as part of the narrative about the ongoing and future directions of XR.
- Both organizations stay focused on their task and welcome listeners, newcomers, and allies.
Both groups alike are working on accessibility into the coming metaverse for all. I applaud their efforts.
Now time for the worsts. Is worsts a word? You will notice a theme from the Bests that carries through. Here it comes…
Worst
1. Not necessarily restricted to 2021 sadly, say the phrase “Women in XR” and you will likely get this image:
Or this one. That’s not even a woman on the right. #dehumanizing means you treat women like animals.
Actually, as I prepped for this article, I went to find one screen capture of a woman in a short skirt playing Beat Saber so that I could use it as a example of a poor behavior. I thought finding one image of a woman in a skirt would be hard. I had remembered seeing one.
Much to my shock and horror, it turns out….it was drop dead easy. So easy, nearly EVERY image on YouTube for playing Beat Saber is of a young female scantily dressed. Check it out:
I counted ~9 images of women playing with either bare legs, bare midriffs, sports bras, etcs, for every 1 man.
Think that’s a coincidence? Oh no. It’s BY REQUEST. Look video info at the bottom of this image I just posted above again.
It says:
“Song + Outfit per George T’s request! To request songs & outfits/costumes become a Patron at…”
This woman is taking money to have herself videoed/green screened playing Beat Saber in a short skirt. Don’t tell me that the Patron isn’t begging for that skirt to fly up at some point. I know what you can see through that black skirt by outline. In these videos, women have not only lost body space control, they are selling it.
It’s disgusting. And this is ALL OVER YouTube. There’s a research project in there to count the views of Beat Saber videos without skirts versus those with.
Remember that the Quest 2 was a major Christmas gift for 2021 and your daughters are now –January 2022– watching YouTube videos to learn how to get better at Beat Saber. Is getting better at the game the only thing they are learning?
Women have been getting groped at tech conferences during large standing-room only keynotes. It’s real that women feel less comfortable in HMDs because they give up body space control.
At any conference right now, by putting on a headset, women take a risk that men do not.
2. Major immersive learning researcher responds to an accessibility question with “I don’t know why a blind person would ever use VR.”
I was running tech support. I was on mute. I sputtered. But the researcher’s mic was hot. The video caught that…I think. It’s out there.
But what does that matter if it’s on video or not, if the researcher truly thought that?
I don’t even know what to do with that.
Major. US. Immersive Learning Researcher.
😔
By the way, for you, reader, in answer to the question, contemplate this:
and
3. Microaggressions against women in the XR industry
I left 3 organizations in 2021 and am no longer associated with them. It’s apparent now that I could not stand up for the rights of women and for accessibility in XR without being targeted myself.
“A microaggression is a subtle behavior – verbal or non-verbal, conscious
or unconscious – directed at a member of a marginalized group that has a
derogatory, harmful effect. Chester Pierce, a psychiatrist at Harvard
University, first introduced the term microaggression in the 1970s. ” https://www.thoughtco.com/microaggression-definition-examples-4171853
Which groups tend to be targeted by microaggressions?
The last organization I left questioned if I was a dues-paying member, so they used an institutional rule to execute an exclusionary move.
😔
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would want to access VR”. I’m so over that. I’m SOOO over that comment.
👿 Let’s make one thing clear: if you make a human “sub-human” in
front of me, there will be angry eyes. Start here: https://equalentry.com/virtual-reality-development-for-blind/ and then here: https://equalentry.com/how-can-a-blind-person-use-virtual-reality/ and for a video, see here (seriously, WATCH the very beginning): https://youtu.be/rvsZ1ssyom8
Sound