A common goal of human-subject experiments in virtual reality (VR) research is evaluating VR hardware and software for use by the general public. A core principle of human-subject research is that the sample included in a given study should be representative of the target population; otherwise, the conclusions drawn from the findings may be biased and may not generalize to the population of interest. In order to assess whether characteristics of participants in VR research are representative of the general public, we investigated participant demographic characteristics from human-subject experiments in the Proceedings of the IEEE Virtual Reality Conferences from 2015-2019. We also assessed the representation of female authors. In the 325 eligible manuscripts, which presented results from 365 human-subject experiments, we found evidence of significant underrepresentation of women as both participants and authors. To investigate whether this underrepresentation may bias researchers' findings, we then conducted a meta-analysis and meta-regression to assess whether demographic characteristics of study participants were associated with a common outcome evaluated in VR research: the change in simulator sickness following head-mounted display VR exposure. As expected, participants in VR studies using HMDs experienced small but significant increases in simulator sickness. However, across the included studies, the change in simulator sickness was systematically associated with the proportion of female participants. We discuss the negative implications of conducting experiments on non-representative samples and provide methodological recommendations for mitigating bias in future VR research.

中文翻译：

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注意差距：虚拟现实研究中女性参与者和作者的代表性不足。

虚拟现实（VR）研究中人类对象实验的一个共同目标是评估VR硬件和软件，以供普通大众使用。人类受试者研究的核心原则是，给定研究中包含的样本应代表目标人群。否则，从发现中得出的结论可能会产生偏差，并且可能无法推广到感兴趣的人群。为了评估VR研究参与者的特征是否能代表普通大众，我们在2015-2019年IEEE虚拟现实会议论文集中通过人类受试者实验调查了参与者的人口特征。我们还评估了女作家的代表性。在325个合格的手稿中，这些手稿展示了365个人类受试者实验的结果，我们发现有证据表明女性作为参与者和作者的比例明显不足。为了研究这种代表性不足是否会偏向研究人员的发现，我们随后进行了荟萃分析和荟萃回归，以评估研究参与者的人口统计学特征是否与VR研究中评估的共同结果相关：头戴式模拟器后模拟器疾病的变化显示VR曝光。不出所料，使用HMD进行VR研究的参与者的模拟器病有轻微但显着的增加。但是，在所有纳入的研究中，模拟器疾病的变化与女性参与者的比例有系统地相关。