Left to right: Leslie Pirritano, Christina Heller, Nichol Bradford, and Megan Gaiser.
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Women say virtual reality industry needs to start with awareness of diversity

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 21 min

Virtual reality is about to take off in a big way. Tech advisor Digi-Capital estimates that it could be a $30 billion industry by 2020. But if follows in the footsteps of the video game industry when it comes to the issue of diversity, that could be a disaster.

That’s the view of a panel of four women that I moderated in a session during the Game Developers Conference last week at the Open Gaming Alliance lounge. Our charter was to talk about the need to diversity the people, apps, and audience for the emerging platform of virtual reality. What better

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.