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(); }
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.
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.
> It's why looking at the horizon on a boat helps.
Yes it helps. As in getting you back to "barely normal". (Also you can't do anything around the boat because you're looking at the horizon)
The theory make sense but some people have the thing turned to 11
I heard of it randomly few months ago, and for me and my wife it's been a game changer for using our phone on transit or in the car.
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
They added it a few years ago. I tried it for about 30 seconds and was so annoyed by how distracting I found it I turned it off and never did again.
I just don’t use the phone when a passenger in a car.
If it works for you and doesn’t bother you as much as me, go for it! I wouldn’t be surprised that it works.
Maybe for christmas you could get your mom a multi axis driving simulation rig.
Any recommendations? I searched, but not sure if the results that come up are just white-boxed versions of the same thing.
Weird, I get extra car sick when I use those. The only way I can consistently not be sick is when I drive.
Seems like there's a few android equivalents:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.panshen.mo...
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.urbandroid...
And even one that claims to work with sound:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.samsung.a1...
EDIT: Actually there's an enormous number of apps like this, many released very recently with similar style etc. Weird.
If you're like me and want an open or non-google-play alternative to these, this is available on F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/dev.davidv.motionsickness/
I can't vouch for it (yet) but am going to give it a try!
It's been rumored that Google would build it into Android for years:
https://www.androidauthority.com/google-motion-cues-pixels-n...
I've tried some of those Android equivalents and they seemed to work on any motion, not on acceleration like the Apple one.
Be careful with these apps. The permissions they ask for are quite expansive.
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.)
I have this on 24/7. I like them even when I'm not driving.
I'll have to try this out. I've gotten motion sickness while using a phone in the car and I swear it continued to affect me for weeks.
Do they have a boat version of this?
I get car sick easily but on open water I have to sit and watch the horizon or it's adios cookies.
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.
> to reduce or, in my case, even eliminate the motion sickness felt when trying to use an iPhone, iPad, or MacBook inside a moving vehicle.
Does it also help people who get carsick without looking at a screen?
I get carsick in pretty much any modern car, unless I'm the one driving.
I have the same question. It would be convenient to be able to be a passenger for once without feeling like the world is escaping from me.
Um, no. What a strange question to post publicly
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.
That’s unfortunate. I didn’t know this feature existed so I’ve yet to try it out. Fingers crossed
Has anyone made a Linux version of this yet? I think Framework laptops and many thinkpads have accelerometers.
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.
I get really bad motion sickness, I tried reading hacker news in the car with these on when the feature first appeared. It didn't help.
It helps, doesn't completely cure it for me but makes looking at google maps / iMessage more bearable. Not reading essays yet though.
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?
Oh wow, this is great!
Has worked very well for my wife who notably couldn’t look at her phone for even a few seconds without feeling ill
My ex-wifey could sit and read for hours. She'd be all "Oh, are we here already?" no matter how badly I drove.
Had no idea this was a thing. Have always gotten car sick anytime I'm not driving. They sold me lol
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?
Wait can I use it for rollercoasters?
Very useful feature for anyone. Probably the lesser known feature because it’s under Accessibility.
It should be a frontline feature to toggle on or off from the command center. It’s there once it’s enabled, but should be there by default.
Don't know that I would say anyone. As I have never had any issue with any sort of motion sickness.
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.
Is this from a press release? It's a substance-free product endorsement.
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.
No, it's an older feature. How it works is not super intuitive so it's good to have reports on how it helped someone.
Also known as word of mouth.