[Preface: dang, thanks for overriding the flags on this HN posting. The discussion thus far seems to be mostly worthwhile, unless it's gone to hell in the twenty minutes or so I've just spent writing this comment, and I'm glad to see it taking place here.]<p>boyd's baccalaureate thesis, of which her blog post appears to be a recapitulation for a general audience, dates from 2000 and spends considerable effort talking about how, for example, the lack of normal maps results in a lack of shape-from-shading cues, which makes it difficult for a visual system prioritizing those cues over parallax cues to develop a 3-space representation of a scene.<p>And that's fair enough! <i>For 2000.</i> Now, though, a decade and a half later, normal maps are ubiquitous in current-gen and next-gen 3D graphics; while it's more computationally expensive to render with them than without them, the Rift's resolution is only 1280x800 overall, and even with the added overhead of parallax calculation, that's still easily within the capabilities of a modern GPU.<p>This is the sort of thing one might expect to be addressed in boyd's discussion of her earlier research. That said, having once read the thesis and then gone back to review the blog post, it's quite plainly a simple restatement of circa-2000 conclusions, and bears no trace of having been updated in light of the enormous advances in graphical rendering technology which have taken place between then and now.<p>I don't know whether there is any evidence of women having trouble with Rift-induced simulator sickness at higher rates than men. Going by boyd's blog post, I <i>can't</i> know, because she doesn't bother to mention whether there is or there isn't; she just rehashes her earlier research and hangs "Oculus" and "sexist" off it as search keywords.<p>This would be disappointing in general from someone reputed as highly as danah boyd; much worse, though, it hamstrings her entire point! Her basic thesis, in this blog post, is "This is a discussion we need to be having." But there's no knowing whether that's true, because in comparison with modern rendering technology, the research on which she bases that statement is hopelessly outdated, and she presents no evidence to suggest that people who rely on shading cues have the same problems with today's VR technology as with that of fifteen years ago.