Never knew this feature existed! I’ve gotten this type of motion sickness my whole life, so I’m excited to try it out. It would be nice if it’s effective for me.
I get the same type of
nausea described by the author. I can’t read a book or look at a screen for too long without a feeling awful. I can also get it just from sitting in a rear passenger seat, especially if vehicle has poor visibility, and even worse with a bad driver. I have to really focus on looking outside the vehicle at the moving world.
Interestingly, I think there are people that have the opposite type of motion sickness. For example, my mom could never play arcade racing games without getting nauseous. The issue being focusing on a screen with rapidly moving objects and everything else in the peripheral being fixed, versus focusing on a fixed object and everything in the peripheral moving. She never had any issue reading a book in a moving car
Yeah I have a similar issue to you. If I look at my phone screen for a few minutes on the bus, I feel like I'm going to vomit. In fact most days that I commute on the bus I feel dreadful the entire way.
Strap me into my race car on the weekend and pull G's in the corners... no problems at all.
Sit me back on the bus, I want to throw up.
The dots on the iPhone do help a little bit. I wouldn't say it cures me, but I can at least check messages on the ride without immediately feeling like death.
Even just checking the time on phone makes me feel sick. I'm using Apple cues from the day they released. It helps, but I still cannot respond to Whatsapp messages. I envy people who can use their phones, laptops during a ride.
Didn't know there's a "car sickness" strictly related to reading the phone while in transit, I knew there's those people that can barely survive riding a car but that was it.
I do get the "reading phone motion sickness" a couple of days after heavy drinking. The hangover has worn off but there's this weird after-effect which gradually fades over a few days until it completely disappears. At first I thought how the hell do I get car sickness until eventually correlated with reading the phone and having to stop or else.
Based on my manifestations being chemically-induced, wonder if that's also valid in general. Some level of Gaba or something, which is normally lower in most people, gets elevated by drinking and then (hopefully) cleared.
> Based on my manifestations being chemically-induced, wonder if that's also valid in general.
Interesting observation. I only drink on one day of my weekends these days, so I don't think mine would be correlated to alcohol. But sugar maybe? It's an interesting thought that it might be related to some kind of metabolic process that's influencing that feeling.
I have the same issue your mom does. First-person shooters give me motion sickness (which is why I never got past the first level of Wolfenstein back in the day). Maybe the newer FPS games would be better for my brain, but I don’t have much interest in trying.
>I never got past the first level of Wolfenstein back in the day
Wolfenstein FOV was way too low, something like <70, which caused that feeling sick, try to get games where you can set you FOV to 85+ and it made a world of difference. motion sickness =gone
I started getting nausea from FPS games around the time I got into my 30s. It was when Fallout 4 came out and I just had to play that game. So I did some research and found out about sea-bands. Theyre for morning sickness that pregnant women get. They worked wonders for my FPS nausea. I was able to play through many games after that without getting sick. Put them on about 10 mins before playing and wear them for the duration.
Interesting, I never heard of those bands. The standard method for decreasing motion sickness in FPS games is widening the FoV and turning off features like screen shake.
One of the other key issues (besides FOV which was mentioned) is the size of the virtual space relative to the speed your character moves at. So for example, Half Life 2 has you moving around in a lab building pretty quickly > instant nausea for me. Meanwhile running around outdoors in Skyrim might not bother you at all.
Visual complexity ups the ante. Think of walking through a grocery store with high shelves filled with a variety of products -- this can cause migraine in some people and, to a lesser extent, also affects vertigo. So you may not want to play, say, grocery store simulators (although I have no idea who actually does anyway, why are those things popular!?).
My wife calls it sim sickness, because she can’t do any POV type games like racing or fps, too. She can play WoW or third person games if they’re zoomed out enough.
She also got motion sickness until she turned on the Apple dots.
Yeah that makes sense, rapid onscreen movement, but your surroundings are fixed. I feel like you hear of that version less often, but it interesting it basically the inverse of the other kind.
> Maybe the newer FPS games would be better for my brain
It might do. I recently had a bout of nostalgia and wanted to play GTA4 again (as a Uni student I only played part-way through without being able to finish the story). I ended up buying a used PS3 to play it, but I couldn't get through 30 mins of it before feeling nauseous. The low FPS on the PS3 just wasn't sitting right with me.
I ended up getting an Xbox Series S. The constant 60fps on this console was a game changer for me.
You don't need to hide it so deeply, it can be added to your control panel add the control 'vehicle motion cues' and you can add a button which allows you to change it between on/auto/off.
I highly recommend people look through apple's accessibility features every major release they seem to quietly release some real gems.
They hid a whole app for sleep/chill/productivity/wellbeing sounds in there as well!
It’s even added automatically the first time you turn it on. But I had no idea the setting even existed, despite occasionally checking Accessibility. We need a “What’s New” for Settings :D
The dots do help a little, but not much. I wouldnt use my phone for long while in a vehicle, though at the very least I no longer dread having to briefly read a text message if I have to.
I found your note on bad drivers interesting. For me, it's the quick acceleration, braking and turning that's the worst. A bit anecdotal, but I also experience car sickness less with women drivers. Maybe because they're usually easier on the acceleration and brakes?
I believe the commenter was being facetious; these are typically professional equipment for racing teams or eccentric multimillionaires. I've done actual motorsport for less than one of these rigs cost.
I think what he means is that the iPhone dots seem to move based on vehicle acceleration and deceleration, whereas the android ones use all phone motion.
If I move my iPhone around in my hands the dots don't move, but on my android they do (ie are simulating a stable horizon as the phone tilts, immediately). I don't know which is more effective. I thought the iPhone one was broken at first and didn't have the best results from it, I'm hoping the less-subtle android ones will work better for me.
Edit: I read from the docs that Apple's works best when facing forward, and I was often sitting sideways on a train
That's strange, any idea how it could be able to differentiate?
My only guess is some sort of processing, like wait and see if it follows the expected acceleration pattern (moderate initial acceleration from the unexpected-to-the-user car motion, followed by a stronger acceleration in the same direction as one's hands push the phone to keep it in the same visual place) but I'd assume such lag is precisely the issue VR etc. has and makes people extra sick. By the time you've counteracted it, your brain has clearly registered that the movement is disjointed from the visual input, so then it's too late for them dots to help right?! That couldn't possibly work (or could it). Very curious how this works. Like, surely it doesn't need to be connected to a compatible car?
Edit: wait, or the camera. That would be very battery-intensive (I guess theoretically it could turn on only 1% of 1 color channel on the sensor, but I'm not aware that this is a mode that the hardware/firmware supports), but when you move it yourself, then the camera would see motion in the opposite direction as when you're unexpectedly being moved such as in a car. Still seems unlikely
Apple uses the derivative (i.e. rate of change) of acceleration, while all the other (ineffective, in my experience) third-party apps simply use acceleration.
People with motion sickness can deal with speed just fine. While relaxing on an equatorial beach, you’ll have no qualms hurtling around the poles at 1600 km/h.
Acceleration is also perfectly fine for motion sickness. Most people are being pulled towards the centre of the earth at 1.0 G with no complaints whatsoever.
But the significance during motion sickness is the rate of change of the rate of change. That thing where the vehicle slows down, turns a corner, goes over a bump.
This is why Apple’s motion cues actually work, because they use what actually matters for motion sickness.
It doesn't seem to actually differentiate at all. If I move my iPhone around on a plane (table), the dots move. If I hold in in my hand and move left/right, the dots move. If I hold it in my hand and raise/lower my arm, the dots don't move. That's actually just an integration of acceleration/gyro, and possibly combined with a simple model of how a phone is held (e.g. assume rotations happen from a point 30cm away from the bottom of the phone).
It works in a plane, so it’s somehow able to detect the higher rate of speed, maybe by integrating, but I think it does use signals from CarPlay as well.
They are using completely different approaches. Apple seems to be mostly using the accelerometer, to draw dots and visualize inertia. The Android apps are using the gyroscope, to draw a horizon.
You're correct, but there's a good reason: they need to draw over other apps to do what they do. So it's not necessarily nefarious. But it is an excellent reason to build the functionality into the OS.
(The reason the permission is so dangerous is they can trick you into pressing the wrong button by relabeling dangerous text with innocuous text.)
The presence of a good reason is exactly why you have to be so careful. Creating an app with a legitimate reason to request permission, only to also abuse it, is a great strategy for an attacker.
Absolutely, which is why I really appreciate the network permission on GrapheneOS. It makes me more comfortable to allow other permissions knowing no data can be exfiltrated.
It's wild to me that "internet access" is not revokable or even displayed in the Play Store in stock Android. It's such a huge security and privacy concern, even if most apps semi-legitimately need it.
Or, it would be wild, if it weren't fairly obvious that this is just Google protecting their mobile ad revenue.
More than half of the ones I have installed have no internet access. Most because they don't have the permission (thanks, F-Droid!) and the rest because I've rejected that permission (thanks, GrapheneOS!)
Not in all app repositories. This isn't so common among open source software as it is in the commercial/adware ones you find very prominently in Google's curated collection
Well, that depends on the other apps you have installed. Unless things have changed in newer versions, apps with no networking can still do IPC, so any app can for example use Cronet to make network requests via Google Play Services, regardless of the toggle, as long as sandboxed Google Play Services has network permission.
Mostly asking it as a question, given that graphene runs Google play services (optionally) as a normal, sandboxed service with no special permissions might help a bit, but I guess unless you disable networking for every other service installed, this is sort of impossible to plug 100%? IPC can be quite the security hole.
Only if the other services provide a network proxy right? You'd need to find an exploit in the app otherwise.
Edit: although, I just remembered that it's actually as simple as sending "open this URL" intents to the Android equivalent of sensible-browser, which everyone will have installed. That does rely on users not understanding or caring about what's happening or it only works for the first user
Yes IPC is definitely a security hole, but because the two apps communicating need to both explicitly support it (I really doubt there'd be an exploitable vulnerability here of all places), it's a much smaller concern. Here I'd mainly worry about apps like Google Photos talking to Google Play Services. GrapheneOS has mentioned they'd like to implement IPC scopes to isolate apps, just like contact scopes and storage scopes.
Funnily enough, the Huawei P30 Pro I was using previously (back when these things could run Android with GMS) had network toggles for all apps. They weren't in the permissions menu, as they were meant for data saving purposes but you had the additional granularity of choosing if an app could access mobile data or Wi-Fi separately.
That solved the problem of ads in games much better than DNS :D
And it even fails in the way that apps will see no-wifi and believe the entire device is offline. That way they can't detect it and mess around without harming regular offline users.
Depends. One of the reasons I stopped using Spotify was because its offline mode refused to work when my device had all radios off (who even thought of this?). Once I turned on Wi-Fi, even without connecting to a network, it would load immediately.
Any self-respecting OS has packet filtering, this isn't unique to or surprising from GrapheneOS. On my Samsung/OneUI I use AFWall+ which sets iptables rules iirc
Tried the first one and it doesn't seem to work (dots don't respond to motion), and is absolutely riddled with intrusive ads. The one that another commenter left which is on F-droid is much better
You might ask why motion sickness even exists in the first place. Why do nausea and vomiting make sense when your body is in a car or on a boat? Nobody knows for sure, but there's a convincing theory.
Zillions of years ago, we were foragers. We ate what we found. And if we ate something bad, like a poisonous berry, we could die. One of the first symptoms of neurotoxin ingestion is that your eyes lose their tracking ability. And an easy way for your body to detect this is when your eyes and ears (vestibular system) disagree about your body's position and motion in space.
So we presumably evolved a simple rule:
if (eyes != ears) { vomit(); }
Which gets that bad berry right back out of the system.
This is why these Android and Apple gadgets work: they restore visual cues helping your eyes match what your ears are telling you. It's why looking at the horizon on a boat helps. And it's why reading in the car gets some people so horribly sick.
> And it's why reading in the car gets some people so horribly sick.
As a kid, I was told to turn 90° so that the back and forth of my eyes reading were in line with the motion of the car. This was soooo before any kind of electronic devices. Hell, the radio in the car still had the giant push buttons for saving stations.
what I was taught (and what still works for me) is to look out the front window, never the sides, and pick a as far away (ideally on the horizon) to focus on.
the theory being, at constant velocity in a straight line, your body feels at rest, so you want to look somewhere that reinforces that. looking out the side window has scenery rushing past, which is the opposite.
turning sideways and reading sounds like a nightmare.
How can you look out the front window at the horizon and be reading at the same time? Somewhere in this thread we've confused generic car sickness with reading while in a car.
This. Obviously, it doesn't help you read but if you're bad enough that just being in a car makes you sick it helps a lot. When I was younger any car sick kids got to sit up front and there were a couple of adults who had to be the driver for the same reason. I still get bad on boats and the only thing that has worked is to find somewhere to lie down and close your eyes for the journey. Makes a big difference on a ferry. Not as effective in smaller boats.
Does this mean that those of us who don't get motion sickness regardless of reading or looking at a phone in a vehicle are less good at handling poison as well?
(I have also been on bumpy flights, no issues whatsoever, even when reading a book at the same time.)
I dont get any motion sickness at all, not on airplane, car, boat, etc.
If I drink enough to get the spins, I will /not/ get sick when my eyes are open, even when my eyes are clearly dealing with nystagmus.. but if I keep my eyes closed for more than 30 seconds, I definitely feel ill.
Ah so when the AIpocalypse finally happens and the rest of us are foraging off the lands around the fortress manors of the leftover billionaires, with their humanoid clankers, I'll be ready. My superior tendency to get roadsick quickly will possibly insure my progeny will also continue on the family line by surviving Actaea rubra consumption
Let me add: I wonder if that's the reason the sight of puke immediately makes me want to vomit too. If you're in a group of people you probably all ate the same stuff. Better to vomit as soon as the first start to feel sick than wait for your turn- it might be too late then.
You might still puke, as the phone is correcting for the car motion, not for your eyes failing to move as commanded, or your ear accelerometer giving faulty readings.
You might still die, so don't eat poison berries please.
Do you retain the sensation that everything is still wobbling? I would get that after being on a boat for long enough. Though motion sickness never made me feel ill to my stomach, rather it just gives me the worst headaches that require fresh air and time to relieve.
Are you asking me? The rule is in the guidelines at the bottom of your screen. "Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans."
I see trivial variants of your comment on almost every long-form article or comment posted to HN. They're so repetitive that it raises doubt whether they're written by humans.
I gave this feature a try and it didn't work for me. I was curious to see if it was effective, so I asked my wife to drive and I tried to read in the iOS "Books" app with the dots on. I think within 5 or 10 minutes I was feeling pretty sick, and stayed that way for the rest of the drive. Hopefully others have better results. I'll have to stick with audiobooks when in motion.
With me, it's useless if I try to actually read something. But there are times where I just want to check my phone for 5 seconds, and that was enough to make me feel sick for the next hour. The dots help me with those quick checks.
They're also good when I'm on a bus/boat/train. I used to get sick quickly when riding any of those, but now I'm fine even with long periods. Cars are just more intense to me for some reason.
As a kid I didn't get carsick at all. I could work on my laptop, read, whatever while my parents drove. As an adult, at some point I started to barely be able to do anything but keep my eyes on the road without feeling bad.
Turned these on recently, and they work bizarrely well...unfortunately. Downside is that I feel like I lost an excuse to avoid devices for a few minutes while traveling.
I had a few years (from 9-12, maybe) where I became carsick very easily, otherwise it hasn't been an issue for me*. In that same time period, I was extremely sensitive to the harsh florescent lights in my classroom, and had to read through a coloured plastic sheet and try my best to cover everything in shadow.
Remembering things like that makes you really thankful when they've just went away. Things do sometimes get better through for no clear reason!
* Except "simulation sickness" from certain 3D games like Minecraft.
My partner got some goofy glasses with liquid in them to help him use his phone in the car.
He only had to wear them for a week or two before his motion sickness from cars was completely cured. Now he can just use his phone, without the glasses, in the car whenever he wants
I can unfortunately report that these dots have not helped me in cars or trains; anything more than a few seconds looking at a screen during a journey will ensure I feel awful until I have an opportunity to sit or lie still for quite a while after. To be fair, even facing backwards on a train usually makes me sick rather rapidly.
Off topic (but helpfully hopeful to someone!): In the rare cases where I get motion sick I can usually "hack" my way out of it by closing my eyes and imagining myself skiing down a mountain avoiding obstacles in an erratic path that matches the patterns of motion I'm feeling (calculated JIT).
Presumably you have to have a lot of experience skiing for this to work, but there are probably isomorphic activities (weaving around a crowd? Playing dodgeball?) that can hack your brain in a similar way.
During long road trips, back before iPhones and the like, my mom would have us pick out a book and buy it for us to read to keep us entertained while driving.
That worked fine for me, I've never gotten carsick, but for my sister could never do that; after reading for not much time, she would start feeling nauseous. Initially I think my parents thought she was exaggerating to get attention, but eventually she puked in the car because of it and they suddenly had no issue believing her.
It eventually led to them buying a cheap TV/VCR combo and a cheap power inverter for the cigarette lighter and using that for road trips, which didn't seem to bother her very much.
I'm skeptical that this kind of tech can fully counteract serious motion sickness, like many hours or days on a boat.
From personal experience, I know that even if you go out onto the deck and look out on the ocean, so that you have a visual reference to the horizon, it doesn't help.
You can look out of the window of the car and still get motion sickness; it doesn't only happen to people who are engaged with something inside the vehicle.
The external visual reference doesn't entirely help the fact that your body is experiencing accelerations not of its own accord.
The leading hypothesis on motion sickness is that your brain interprets the mismatched motion sensations as being caused by a poison acting on your brain, and triggers a response to empty your stomach contents and make you averse to more ingestion.
This mechanism is not easily defeated by visual tricks. If they can slow the onset and reduce the severity, that is welcome, of course.
BTW, has anyone here tried the motion sickness glasses? This is an object which has a hollow rim, partially filled with colored fluid. The glass rims, as well as additional circles placed laterally near the temples, act as "semicircular canals": the fluid moves to provide a kind of horizon reference.
The apps are targeted at a very specific but common use case: being unable to read while in a moving vehicle. It's not going to help you if you're on a sailboat in heavy seas for a day.
I dunno, I was wondering about this .. if maybe there were a projector on the mast or from a cabin-ceiling mounted project, which always gave a local physical reference to the Earth, no matter the condition of the boat on the sea, it might kind of produce the same effect - albeit instead of applying dots to the screen, its dots to the hull. I really wonder if a polka-dot locator would be effective in addressing sea sickness..
You can get sea sick while outside on an upper deck. Or even if you're looking out of the window of the land vehicle you're riding. As a kid, I got nausea on ~2h bus trips, even though I looked out the window. If you don't look out the window, the onset may be quicker and stronger, so there may be some mitigating effect.
Your best bet is medications, though.
Funny story.
This year I went to Ogasawara ("Bonin Islands"): 24 hours by boat. The sea was rough on the way there. Pretty strong winds which added several hours to the time. I puked like 20 times, the last 17 of those on completely empty stomach contents or just water.
On the way back I took the Japanese anti-nausea cocktail known as Aneron which contains four drugs, none of which are available in Canada over the counter. The instructions warn against combining with other meds. I disregarded that and also took Gravol for good measure. I slept almost the entire 24 hours (except for waking up once to reload on the shorter-acting Gravol), and walked like a zombie after alighting in Tokyo. My heart rate was down to 40 (and I was not in good aerobic shape, though getting there now).
They don't cure my kids' or wife's car sickness, unfortunately. I'm not sure the implementation is as good as it could be. It seems a bit rough.
Motion sickness is an overlooked problem. A large percentage of the population has severe, almost debilitating motion sickness. It curtails a ton of travel. Almost all transportation and tourism related businesses would stand to benefit hugely from a real cure, not to mention VR and even regular gaming to some degree. There ought to be an industry effort to fund research.
OTOH, motion sickness is often called "car sickness" for a reason, people who suffer from it only sometimes suffer on a bus, and rarely if ever on a train or a plane, so I'm not sure I would agree that "all transportation and tourism related businesses" are impacted. Also, doesn't dimenhydrinate work for your wife or kids?
Nausea is from Latin "seasickness", known for thousands years.
From my experience bus was the worst as you can't get front seat, even worse were backward positioned seats. Train and plane were great. Car in the middle, depend on road and driving style.
If I was on bus during childhood you would know by stops it made. We avoided that by traveling by car.
I experience motion sickness more easily on planes than on trains or buses. Boats are a problem too, in heavy seas.
In a large plane with no or very light turbulence the motion sickness doesn't brake through, it's only an uneasy feeling. In heavier turbulence, or in things like a small Cessna or a sailplane it gets worse. I haven't had to vomit in these situations since I was a little kid, but I do feel bad from nausea.
Funnily enough, I don't get seasick in heavy seas - even below deck without a horizon - but I will sitting at the dock with light motion. It's like my vestibular system "knows" to shut up when the chaotic motion goes beyond certain parameters.
Yeah, my wife and I were on a cruise once that was going through some VERY rough waters, and the swaying of the ship was making us sick. We took dimenhydrinate and it put us to sleep right after breakfast and we slept until like 5 PM. Lost an entire day.
There's a non-drowsy anti-sickness formula out now called meclizine, but I found it to be less effective.
It's not a 'cure' for me either but it does allow me to do quick short tasks on the phone if necessary and then I can get back to focusing on the horizon.
It'd be interesting to gather some actual statistics. I can't look at a screen for more than a minute as a passenger without starting to feel a twinge in my gut.
And of those, how many does this help, and how much? Like does this mean I could look at a map application while my wife drives for a few minutes and be ok? Or does it help a lot of people be able to read for a long time?
In my family, Apple's implementation helps only a small amount if at all. I'd also love to see some real statistics. What I think is really missing is coverage of peripheral vision, so maybe a similar feature built into AR glasses could be a real solution.
I wish I could cure my sea sickness. The only thing that's worked is being on a boat more often (which isn't possible for me at the moment), and getting more sleep. The anti-nausea tablets unfortunately put me to sleep and they don't feel very safe in terms of driving to/from the boat
The popular OTC for meclizine is Bonine. Many friends report positive results from it, but it doesn't do anything for me. My options are Dramamine (deep sleep) or nothing (headache and vomit).
I've heard of people mixing Dramamine with a ton of caffeine, but I've been too scared to try it, like I might have a heart attack from all the caffeine. Actually, I heard Kevin Bacon suffers from motion sickness, and that's what he did to get through filming the 0-gravity scenes in Apollo 13. Or something like that.
I had motion sickness for the first ~38 years of my life, and had it cured.
Posting here because I went the majority of my life without knowing that such a treatment existed.
About a year ago I flew to the University of North Dakota and spent an hour a day over 3 days sitting in a simulator that would spin faster and faster while the facilitator talked to me over the headset and kept me distracted.
Was nowhere near as bad as I'd feared, honestly maybe a 3/10 on the discomfort/nausea scale.
Ever since then, motion sickness completely gone. I used to despise boats, calling them mankind's cruelest invention. Taken many flights, reading car trips, hot humid boat rides in rough seas in southeast asia since and... nothing.
Would 100% recommend. I think you can find the program at the bottom of this page, it's $400:
Wow That’s amazing, how bad was your motion sickness before you went? This would be life changing for me, I have to take dimenhydrinate when I fly or else I’ll get nauseous to the point of vomiting.
In VR, it's well known that your peripheral vision is a cue to your brain to infer motion direction.
You can give yourself serious motion sickness in VR if you grab hold of the VR camera and force a roll / pitch in this state.
One of the things some games do is during motion create "tunnel vision" when you move, shrinking down the size of the video feed and putting a black border around it. This significantly reduces this unpleasant effect. I assume the high resolution portion of your eyeball isn't used for motion inference, which makes sense.
I'm thinking this feature is exploiting this same peripheral vision cue.
The peripheral receptive fields in the eyes are much bigger than the ones in the center of vision. The smaller center fields are better for detail due to their resolution, while the off center fields are indeed tuned for motion.
Using tunnel vision to blunt motion detection is a clever way to reduce VR motion sickness. It never clicked for me why VR games did that until you brought it up
I've been using an app on my Android called KineStop. It definitely works.
I also recently picked up an EmeTerm wristband - it's basically a mini TENS machine for you wrist. I was super skeptical, but my sister recommended it so I tried it and it absolutely helps with (though doesn't always total eliminate) nausea I get from motion sickness. I'm not entirely sure how it works, but it seems like it may have an accelerometer and use that to decide when (and at what strength/duration?) to send a mild shock.
I don't get car sick looking at a screen in a car, but my daughter very quickly does. Excited to set this up for her to see if it helps her, especially with our annual US Independence Day car trip coming up.
Can this same idea be extrapolated to a device that emits concentrated beams onto the surface of a book?
I'm thinking of those clip-on lights for books that allow one to read in the dark, but for this purpose explicitly. My daughter also gets car sick reading paper books while in a moving vehicle.
One simple question detects motion sickness susceptibility in migraine patients: While riding in a car or bus, can you read without getting motion sick?
Getting sick from eg reading while driving is what it intends to protect. But you can use it without really using your phone, like staring at a blank screen, ie not "using" your phone in the typical sense. For people that get sick from motion more generally, as opposed to sick while reading and moving, which is far more common.
The article mentions this, but it works on Macbooks as well! You can set up a shortcut key (press the fingerprint button 3x) to enable and disable it. I have a work shuttle I take and this makes it so much more tolerable to use my computer on the bus.
I find using something that puts a display right in front of me also works, like Xreal glasses. I'm not super susceptible to car sickness, but it has hit me in the past. However, with a "heads up display", I never even feel the early warning signs.
My personal model of motion sickness is that either your inner ear is saying, "Hey we are moving" and your eyes are saying "No we're not!" (classic sea sickness/car thing). Or your eyes are saying, "Hey we're moving!" and your inner ear is saying, "No we're not!" (classic VR motion sickness).
So it makes sense with that model that you'd get motion sickness reading in the car. Your eyes are so focused on the fixed page you're not getting the movement cues you would if you looked out the window. The dots give you that cue somewhat subliminally.
I have a theory it could be slightly nauseating for one to try and read when not in motion while dots moved around the page like that.
At least on the iPhone, they don't move if the phone isn't detecting motion. If you're sitting on a couch with the feature on, there's just dots on the screen, lurking, waiting...
Yes. Ive been using for a long time now. Im middle aged and get sick easily (example: vomited last plane ride). Doesnt matter what i do, despite being inconsistent.
These dots help tremendously. On airplanes and commuter trains and such, i just pop open phone and stare at screen, sometimes a blank note even. It has helped me clearly see: My brain does not perceive acceleration correctly. When it can visualize the motion with the dots, somehow that helps cue it in as to what is really happening. I am very often surprised at the direction of acceleration, ie when the plane is turning, if im not looking out the window, i think i would be unable to tell you if the plane is turning or not; but the dots are flying sideways off the screen - ah.
My favorite discovery which really cemented this, and a good correlary to how even looking out the window is not enough: When the commuter train stops, and is no longer moving, the dots on the screen will remain moving (forward, ie im reverse) a few moments. Or when the plane is taking off and shifts from straight to up, the dots often stop moving, or change direction.
This change in acceleration you feel, which is not merely "which direction are we going", is the part brains like mine arent picking up right. These dots help a ton. I wish i could embed them into glasses - one day!
For me it's really just modern cars. Older cars which are more spacious and have better outside visibility, as well as being better at transferring the sensation of movement and acceleration don't affect me in the same way. Trains and planes are also fine.
I'll try this out, hopefully it will make taxi rides a lot less dreadful!
I've been the same way my whole life. Utterly miserable with profuse sweating across my entire body when it does happen, and then I'll feel varying degrees of nauseous and uncomfortable in other ways until I wake up the next day.
The method I've settled into for consistent results is:
1. Eat a full meal & hydrate 30+ minutes before traveling. Sometimes this involves overeating in a day, but the alternative is worse for me.
2. Take 6.25-12.5mg of meclizine 30-45 minutes before traveling (quarter, third, or half of a standard meclizine tablet depending on road conditions -- windy, hilly, and/or frequent stop-and-go traffic for long periods of time = half, while a mostly straight road with smooth acceleration = quarter).
3. Eat small amounts (periodic snacking) while traveling; more sugary foods like dried mango seems to work best.
4. Include ginger in any form with the snacking (sometimes I'll simply cut a chunk of raw ginger and take small bites out of it).
I don't even bother trying to read or use electronics while in a car or while on a flight during any taxiing or ascent/descent. Some buses or trains are circumstantially fine. Definitely will be trying some of the Android versions of this.
Not sure if the word 'modern' is meant to carry meaning there. Did/do you not get sick in non-modern cars? I could imagine less good soundproofing giving your brain extra clues or so but it seems odd. Are non-cars an issue (bus/train)?
I wonder if this could work on computers, not just smartphones/tablets. Presumably so, assuming they have enough motion sensors. Could a third party dev build it, or is it something that only Apple can build?
Just a note, be careful on your laptop in the front passenger seat. If you get into an accident, the airbag is pushing that device right towards your head.
Very interesting. I've noticed myself getting mildly car sick now that I'm a little older if I don't take breaks every so often. Does anyone know if there's a similar feature on Android?
No, but it might be related to the fact that they have an exceptional seal and are the only things to actually stay in my ear. They do appear to also create additional pressure inside the ear especially in loud environments so might be related.
A relatively simple generic device, mounted on a car's interior ceiling, seems possible: It would project light 'dots' below onto everything the user looks at. Using the car's momentum, the dot movement could be mechanical, though you'd need power for the light.
Not every passenger would want to see the dots; their range could be restricted to the user's seating area or narrower - the user placing objects under the dots as needed. Also, of course the device could be turned on and off.
The dots need brightness and color visible on different surfaces, but those could be easily user-adjusted. Also, I wonder if a grid would work. (Edit: For use with screens, possibly the background reflection of the device, with its grid of lights, would work.)
The real question is, would it work? Does Apple's solution generally work or is the OP just a happy anecdote? Is there more magic to Apple's solution than dots swaying with momentum?
There may be a way to do this with a point-source light (a focused LED, or maybe an appropriate laser), and a diffraction grating (which may be already exist in stage lighting world). Such that when the parts move relative to eachother, the projected dots move across the car's interior.
In terms of controls, it seems likely that it should seek to emulate whatever it is that goes on inside the inner ear, so that the input from our eyes better-matches the input from our ears.
I don't know how Apple's dots work (and I don't think my singular iOS device is new enough to try), but if they only respond to acceleration, then doing it this way should help establish mechanical limits: The acceleration (in any direction) of a car is finite, and always returns to zero.
Wow, the Epley maneuver doesn't help, huh? I don't think these dots would help either, as their movement wouldn't match the inner ear sensation you feel.
Not really, I've been to various docs for this.. one said BPPV attacks usually hit people 1-3x in a lifetime, I average that per year. Head MRI revealed nothing interesting. It's much diminished from its peak abuse of my system, but I have low-grade persistent vertigo that shows up if I move too fast, like turning in a closet.
These days, if you see a roller coaster train stopped on the lift hill, it's 10x more likely to be caused by the ride ops stopping the ride to confiscate a phone than for a breakdown [0].
A whole lotta wannabe influencers want to record a video of themselves on a ride.
[0] Also, most "breakdowns" on roller coasters are from the ride computer thinking something isn't quite right and stopping the ride as a precautionary measure. It's actually pretty uncommon for there to be an actual mechanical failure.
I've installed one of the free Android ones and will try it if I remember. As an adult I don't get driven around very often any more, so it's easy to forget I get motion sickness. So far I've got it from cars, buses and boats, but never trains or aeroplanes. I've noticed I'm far more susceptible to it when I'm tired and/or hungry (which probably means low blood sugar or something), to the extent that even the best driver in the world will make me sick in such a state.
> Probably the lesser known feature because it’s under Accessibility.
First thing I do on a new device is browse accessibility settings. They're among the most useful and I'm always excited for what extra features you can get if you just browse that section
For example turning off animations is somehow an accessibility thing, but it also just makes everything work instantly and you're not having to wait for animations to complete (which in the alarm app triggers a bug where it'll select the wrong hour if you didn't let it finish animating the hour dial before starting on the minute dial). Or finding out during initial browse that it can do autogenerated offline subtitles, that's a useful solution to know about when you want to watch a clip someone sent with relevant audio but can't listen to the audio
Everyone should know about Accessibility because it's where "reduce pointless animations" and "bring contrast back" are too :)
As for this feature, I found out about it and turned it on, but I don't think it helped me much with reading off the screen while in a car.
It's interesting how many kinds of motion sickness there are. I have no problem reading in trains, or sitting in a car and looking ahead or through the window. But I can't read in a car, even with these dots.
I've always had the exact opposite problem. If I read or use my phone I'm fine. If I try to look around while the car is in motion I get more and more nauseated until after about 40 minutes I can barely walk when we finally stop.
Do you have poor balance? If your vestibular system is not reporting properly then a disconnect between eyes and its output could cause problems when you are looking around.
I love stories like these. Lots of accessibility features like these dots are sort of conceptually very simple and potentially quite weird ideas, IMHO, but when they work, they work like magic. I have a big soft spot for things that make it more comfortable or even possible in the first place to operate a device, whether a user is disabled or not.
The Verge is pretty well-known for their ethics policy [1] (they won't take money from any company they talk about) and that actually enables them to highlight interesting stuff like this that companies would never bother to pay to promote.
This article is actually the first time I've heard of this feature and I follow Apple news a lot, so I appreciate it.
> The Verge is pretty well-known for their ethics policy [1]
Had a read through it, stumbled over this one:
> We do not give subjects of our reporting the ability to preview or approve interview questions, nor do we allow them to review our stories before we publish.
In Germany, that would be considered strange - here it is established good practice in print/written interviews to hand over the final story to the interview partner(s) [1], especially when the interview consists of a lot of industry-specific jargon to make sure that there's some sort of quality control.
"Feature touted to do <x> actually did <x> for me" is newsworthy.
We're out from WWDC and a ton of marketing claims and PR has been thrown around. Taking any company's claim for granted would be foolish, and it is truly welcomed that they did try the feature and found some basis to the claims. I wish we had more of those.
I can just see the meeting where the apple developers pitched this. "Some of our users want to stare at their black rectangles for 18 hours a day but unfortunately have to take a break and stare out of the window because of motion sickness. How can we help them in order to drive up usage even more?"
There's probably a meeting going on somewhere inside google/apple right now to work out how to cure humans of the need for sleep.
I get the same type of nausea described by the author. I can’t read a book or look at a screen for too long without a feeling awful. I can also get it just from sitting in a rear passenger seat, especially if vehicle has poor visibility, and even worse with a bad driver. I have to really focus on looking outside the vehicle at the moving world.
Interestingly, I think there are people that have the opposite type of motion sickness. For example, my mom could never play arcade racing games without getting nauseous. The issue being focusing on a screen with rapidly moving objects and everything else in the peripheral being fixed, versus focusing on a fixed object and everything in the peripheral moving. She never had any issue reading a book in a moving car
reply