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.
Exactly. It seems to me it has to do with some sort of weird disconnect in our brains of feeling the motion of the vehicle, and what we are visually seeing with our eyes.
This is why I prefer to be in the driver seat at all times if possible. If you’re driving you’re in full control of everything & you’re intensely focused on all the surroundings. Absolutely zero motion sickness for me.
Front passenger seat of a four-door vehicle, you’re still pretty focused on you’re surroundings, but you have no control so unexpected movements can trigger this or looking at your phone/book/magazine or whatever intensifies the effect.
Sitting in the backseat is even worse, much more limited visibility. Sitting in the back of the bus like you said? Way worse, add to the fact that bus drivers tend to be pretty crappy, game over! Public buses absolutely destroy me as well. The only thing I can recommend is to stare outside the window and focus on things in the distance as much as possible.
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.
Interesting observation back at you! :) Never thought of this but recently I started being a bit more careful with my sugar and carbs intake, after a blood test has shown an elevated level of glycated hemoglobin. Could be it's not alcohol per se but disruption of blood sugar after a binge drink, thanks for making the connection. Darn it, first no sugar, then no carbs now I have to cut down on alcohol too, getting old sucks :P
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.
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 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.
>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
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.
> 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.
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!?).
Gets me both ways--can't read in a car, can't play most FP games (shooter or not.)
With FPS I can clearly tell which ones are going to be a problem. Anything where the whole viewport moves at all rapidly is an issue, especially if it is something other than a straight scroll. But I'm fine with pretty much anything where my cursor moves within the viewport, the viewport only scrolling when I reach the limits.
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.
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
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.
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 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
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).
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.
Seems unlikely/strange that all these clones would miss this little thing of using the derivative instead of the accelerometer directly so that it 'actually works'
> 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.
That's the same as being pulled towards the earth at 1 gee. Both are acceleration from the accelerometer's point of view. I'm not sure how to convey this well in text, but maybe try installing a sensor reader (e.g. https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.rwth_aachen.phyphox/) and looking at how the accelerometer values change when you move it in various ways
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.
From an accelerometer's point of view, there is no observable difference between standing "still" (on earth's surface, moving some km/s around its axis, which also moves around the sun, which also moves around the milky way, which...) and being in an airplane. Both feel ~9.8m/s/s acceleration in the same direction because both are in a moving reference frame that stands still with respect to the accelerometer. The 'absolute' speed of the airplane (relative to the ground or air) is not something the accelerometer can measure, so it couldn't not work at 'higher rates of speed'. (If I understood your comment correctly!)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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'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).
I'd quite like to see what the effect would be with the polka projector though, especially if its able to project feed points on the boat hull .. I think it'd be the same factor as Appels' device, no?
Anyway I can't tolerate a dependency on drugs at sea, at least not on my boat.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
Buy a CO2 monitor and note the difference between the car's air conditioner on recirculate mode vs fresh air. Also try the same thing in places such as buses and planes. Think also about what happens with all that shared "stale" air for hours.
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 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.
Mine was not that severe. I would get mildly nauseous during normal commercial airplane turbulence, although very nauseous in small planes and the worst nausea of my life after a glider session, very seasick to the point of being debilitated, and then probably a 6 or 7 out of 10 when reading in the car for more than a few minutes.
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.
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.
One simple question detects motion sickness susceptibility in migraine patients: While riding in a car or bus, can you read without getting motion sick?
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.
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'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 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?
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...
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?
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.
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.
maybe its not that they have a perfect seal, but that they slow the pressure change so your ears adapt better? I think there are actually airplane earplugs that are meant to basically seal but have a tiny hole in them.
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.
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.
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.
Exactly. It seems to me it has to do with some sort of weird disconnect in our brains of feeling the motion of the vehicle, and what we are visually seeing with our eyes.
This is why I prefer to be in the driver seat at all times if possible. If you’re driving you’re in full control of everything & you’re intensely focused on all the surroundings. Absolutely zero motion sickness for me.
Front passenger seat of a four-door vehicle, you’re still pretty focused on you’re surroundings, but you have no control so unexpected movements can trigger this or looking at your phone/book/magazine or whatever intensifies the effect.
Sitting in the backseat is even worse, much more limited visibility. Sitting in the back of the bus like you said? Way worse, add to the fact that bus drivers tend to be pretty crappy, game over! Public buses absolutely destroy me as well. The only thing I can recommend is to stare outside the window and focus on things in the distance as much as possible.
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.
>> But sugar maybe?
Interesting observation back at you! :) Never thought of this but recently I started being a bit more careful with my sugar and carbs intake, after a blood test has shown an elevated level of glycated hemoglobin. Could be it's not alcohol per se but disruption of blood sugar after a binge drink, thanks for making the connection. Darn it, first no sugar, then no carbs now I have to cut down on alcohol too, getting old sucks :P
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.
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 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.
edit: clarity
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.
> I never heard of those bands
They're entirely placebos, so that might be why.
And having a reticle.
>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
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.
> 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.
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!?).
Gets me both ways--can't read in a car, can't play most FP games (shooter or not.)
With FPS I can clearly tell which ones are going to be a problem. Anything where the whole viewport moves at all rapidly is an issue, especially if it is something other than a straight scroll. But I'm fine with pretty much anything where my cursor moves within the viewport, the viewport only scrolling when I reach the limits.
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.
I only get it watching other people play, playing myself and being in control of the motion doesn’t seem to bother me.
It’s a great feature, I’ve been testing it while we drive in the Greek mountains. I don’t know why it’s buried so deep in Settings.
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!
> you can add a button which allows you to change it between on/auto/off
There is an automatic mode that works perfectly for me.
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
You can add it as a Control Center toggle as well which is useful for quickly enabling / disabling without digging through the settings
At this point the Accessbility preference panes are just crammed full with tweaks and tools – good if you need them, bad for discovery!
Maybe for christmas you could get your mom a multi axis driving simulation rig.
Just get her a rally car, costs about the same and much more fun.
Any recommendations? I searched, but not sure if the results that come up are just white-boxed versions of the same thing.
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.
Eccentric, how dare you?
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?
It really works. Just put it on auto and let the phone’s accelerometer control when it turns on.
The crazy thing is if I focus on the dots (versus the text behind them), my nausea comes back.
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.
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!
This one works well. Small, simple, no ads, open source.
It does have weird jumps if you tilt your phone though. Something's not quite right with its algorithm.
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.
That's physically impossible.
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
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).
The difference is very simple:
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.
Seems unlikely/strange that all these clones would miss this little thing of using the derivative instead of the accelerometer directly so that it 'actually works'
> 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.
That's the same as being pulled towards the earth at 1 gee. Both are acceleration from the accelerometer's point of view. I'm not sure how to convey this well in text, but maybe try installing a sensor reader (e.g. https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.rwth_aachen.phyphox/) and looking at how the accelerometer values change when you move it in various ways
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.
From an accelerometer's point of view, there is no observable difference between standing "still" (on earth's surface, moving some km/s around its axis, which also moves around the sun, which also moves around the milky way, which...) and being in an airplane. Both feel ~9.8m/s/s acceleration in the same direction because both are in a moving reference frame that stands still with respect to the accelerometer. The 'absolute' speed of the airplane (relative to the ground or air) is not something the accelerometer can measure, so it couldn't not work at 'higher rates of speed'. (If I understood your comment correctly!)
Yeah, probably could have phrased that better.
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 can't only use the accelerometers. If you do as soon as you tilt the phone it will think you are rapidly accelerating.
Apple will be doing full 6 DoF sensor fusion, and then processing the result in a different way.
Ah, ok. Thanks for the clarification.
I've found Kinestop to be much more effective and immediate than Apple's, highly recommend.
Same, +1 for KineStop.
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.)
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.
There's basically zero apps without some sort of analytics nowadays.
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!)
That's fine. The OS should still let me turn off all outbound network connections for an app.
Apps that are solely relying on analytics still tend to function when the analytics are unreachable.
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
Sounds like a concern for app devs but something that shouldn't be a concern for users (because they should be able to turn it off)
Well, Google is the advertisement company.
>no data can be exfiltrated.
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.
Good point and thanks for the heads up.
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
Yeah, there are endless holes unfortunately with IPC. It has been hardened by more recent android versions https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/manifest/queries-...
but even something like "share via Chat app" can be used to leak information, e.g. it will have the link preview loaded".
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.
Yep, nothing has changed yet. GOS project still has this in the road map, but as of now Inter Profile Sharing still works.
> so any app can for example use Cronet to make network requests via Google Play Services
Cronet? Isn't that Chromium's networking library? How's that letting apps connect via Google Play Services?
Agreed.
Network permissions could be used to avoid ads on Android. The horror!
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.
Try Metrolist it's free, fantastic and supports offline caching.
https://metrolist.meowery.eu/
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
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
KineStop at least claims to collect no user data, and has no ads: https://play.google.com/store/apps/datasafety?id=com.urbandr...
> EDIT: Actually there's an enormous number of apps like this, many released very recently with similar style etc. Weird.
It's mostly just Devs copying apples feature, nothing too weird about it
You may be wrong here and Apple seems to be the one copying the feature. Someone mentioned KineStop in this thread and that's been around since 2018.
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
Read the reviews on that first one. They seem to have gone over to the dark side.
I found my Xiaomi 13 (Hyper OS 3) also has this feature.
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:
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.
Those giant “push” buttons, which automatically unpushed the other buttons when one is pushed, are called…. Get ready… radio buttons.
Now you know why radio buttons are called that in modern UIs.
This is one hell of a trivia.
Ho Lee Shit.
In (post)communist countries there is a common name - ISOSTAT switch.
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.
Serially.
You read something, get reminded you have car sickness, then look out of the window to try to cure it and not vomit
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.
...and did it work?
I've never gotten car sick from reading like this, so ::shrug:: It's helped other people I tell from what I've been told
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.
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.)
perhaps it means you are more immune to poison, so you don't need to vomit
I have a friend who absolutely loves getting the spins from excessive drinking. She liked to lie down and watch the room spinning.
I would need to ask her if she gets motion sickness.
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.
Claude, you are a leading pioneering CRISPR researcher.
FIX THE CODE!
> 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
Once it starts for me, it's not stopping for at least a couple hours, even if I immediately get back on solid ground.
But I used to get sick playing Quake, so maybe I'm in the 11 group.
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.
Just nausea for me. What you're describing sounds like the recovery phase of sea legs.
I figured it was more
If it was just eyes and ears it doesn't seem like VR motion sickness would be such a thing.I don’t follow. Are you under the misapprehension that ears was referring to auditory perception, rather than vestibular sense of motion?
Yes! I managed to miss the whole vestibular system mention and focused on the code.
I suppose you could design an experiment that mucked with proprioception but not the vestibular system. Count me out as a test subject.
There's a company that supposedly created a device that mucks with your vestibular system to combat vertigo.
https://otolithlabs.com/vertigo/
This site has been up for several years though with no product being released, so I'm starting to question if it actually worked.
The worst motion sickness that I ever got was from an early VR set, hacked together at someone's home.
With regular motion sickness, the eyes say "you're standing still", while the inner ears say "you're moving".
With VR, it's the other way around.
It's the original end to end testing!
There's another end to test, yet!
Unfortunately, I get car sick just sitting in the back. No need to look at a phone. So I guess I'll have to wait until Apple Glasses to come out.
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
So now if i ate a poisous berry in a car while on my phone I could die?
:) it's the price of progress.
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.
Are AI comments allowed on HN?
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.
you are not very good at detecting llm writing.
no no,i agree with torlok, OP's comment stinks of AI
You should flag it. That's much better than polluting comment threads, and it'll help dang identify polluters.
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.
It works for me, but only if I hold the phone up in front of my face, basically perpendicular to the road.
Same for me, when riding the bus. Really wanted it to work and tried over the course of several weeks, unfortunately it didn't help.
That’s unfortunate. I didn’t know this feature existed so I’ve yet to try it out. Fingers crossed
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.
An excuse? You do you, but who is asking you for justifications? You can just put the phone down.
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
Are you talking about these bad boys: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DQG99L4J ?
I suffer from motion sickness. It sucks. I'll try anything. If those goofy glasses work, I'll wear them.
My wife has terrible motion sickness in cars (just riding, reading is out of the question) and these glasses help a lot.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> and rarely if ever on a train or a plane
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.
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.
Dimenhydrinate has undesirable side effects. My wife cannot ride buses and gets sick on planes too. It restricts our travel quite a bit.
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.
> They don't cure my kids' or wife's car sickness, unfortunately.
Isn't it a better "cure" to look out the window rather than stare at a screen?
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.
If you're looking for non drowsy options, I've found ginger capsules to be very effective as an anti nausea treatment.
Supposedly 1/3 of people are "highly susceptible".
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.
[flagged]
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).
I'd quite like to see what the effect would be with the polka projector though, especially if its able to project feed points on the boat hull .. I think it'd be the same factor as Appels' device, no?
Anyway I can't tolerate a dependency on drugs at sea, at least not on my boat.
Has anyone made a Linux version of this yet? I think Framework laptops and many thinkpads have accelerometers.
Dunno if they work, but these glasses [1] supposedly help with motion sickness as well
1: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/motion-sickness-g...
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.
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.
This doesn't work for everyone, for example, if I get motion sick, closing my eyes makes it far worse, almost immediately.
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.
Weird, I get extra car sick when I use those. The only way I can consistently not be sick is when I drive.
What is the origin of this trick? It seems like the kind of thing that might have been discovered in academia but overlooked for years.
It helps, doesn't completely cure it for me but makes looking at google maps / iMessage more bearable. Not reading essays yet though.
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
Meclizine OTC is non-drowsy and works really well for my wife.
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'll give it a go thankyou!
I have this on 24/7. I like them even when I'm not driving.
They might be useful for working during earthquakes.
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.
What's the setting called? I haven't been able to find it. Is it only on Tahoe or something?
Accessibility -> Motion -> Vehicle Motion Cues.
This is on Tahoe, not sure about earlier versions.
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 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.
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.
> 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 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.
Buy a CO2 monitor and note the difference between the car's air conditioner on recirculate mode vs fresh air. Also try the same thing in places such as buses and planes. Think also about what happens with all that shared "stale" air for hours.
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 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:
https://www.aerospacephysiology.com/
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.
Mine was not that severe. I would get mildly nauseous during normal commercial airplane turbulence, although very nauseous in small planes and the worst nausea of my life after a glider session, very seasick to the point of being debilitated, and then probably a 6 or 7 out of 10 when reading in the car for more than a few minutes.
Definitely worth a shot IMO.
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.
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.
It is specifically for using your phone. So I don’t know if it would help.
I don’t think it’s actually driving specific, I think it just is based on the accelerometer. So it might work.
It helps even if not actually using your phone, and for all kinds of motion.
(am highly succeptible to motion sickness, i generally have the feature on at all times).
How does it help if you aren't using the phone?
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.
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.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bjorl.2023.101382
One simple question detects motion sickness susceptibility in migraine patients: While riding in a car or bus, can you read without getting motion sick?
Anything similar for Windows users? My wife is suffering from car sickness as she works on taxi a lot.
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.
> 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.
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!
Thanks!
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.
Thanks! I don't take medicine for things I don't need, and it's so rare that I go through this that I don't think I'll ever have some handy.
Ginger does help although not as much as I'd like. Eating in general does as well but even less than ginger.
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 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
lol
Seriously, how can this fix which is a solution involving looking at a screen help when not looking at a screen?
I don't think you understood my question. Read the other responses to my question and it might give you a clue.
Android version: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cn.com.wiisoft...
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 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?
This works really well in the Tesla Ubers here in NYC when i'm working on my MacBook :)
Ah, didn't realize it was on MacOS. I had only seen the announcement about mobile devices.
Do you find it is more/less effective on different kinds of devices?
It came in macOS Tahoe 26 — a year later than on iOS and iPadOS.
Personally, I find it somewhat less effective on larger screens, simply because my eyes are more likely to be further from the dots.
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...
So you might be right, but it can't be tested.
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?
> I prefer to toggle the dots to avoid seeing them when I’m driving the car.
Please do not look at your phone screen while driving the car.
Is navigation a legitimate use of a phone screen while driving? I wouldn't want the dots on my map, so I'll charitably assume that's what GP meant.
Probably the only reason I'd ever buy an apple device at this point.
I get super car sick, like projectile vomit straight out of a horror movie sick, after an hour of staring at a screen in the car.
Awesome share!
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.
Gotta love how Apple cares (or used to care) about making their products a holistically good user experience
Pro tip: apple airpods pro 3's somehow solve car sickness for me. No other noise cancelling product has ever had anything similar.
Maybe not even related to the noise cancelling but to do with air pressure or something with the inner ear? Do ear plugs work?
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.
maybe its not that they have a perfect seal, but that they slow the pressure change so your ears adapt better? I think there are actually airplane earplugs that are meant to basically seal but have a tiny hole in them.
Interesting because I have foam tips on my Pro 2s and sometimes the pressure from the noise cancellation will actually make me feel worse.
the pro 3's noise cancelling is in a league of its own, so might be related to faster response time, not sure.
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.
yeah this feature works for me and its amazing! BUT one interesting caveat - it doesnt work when im in an electric car
I wonder if this might work for my sickness with 3D apps and games on desktop. Even watching Minecraft is nauseating
No, that is the opposite issue.
I have this problem and I did not know about this feature. thanks for sharing.
Had no idea this was a thing. Have always gotten car sick anytime I'm not driving. They sold me lol
I run it for about a year, because it’s more festive. Especially during the holidays
Saw this before the evening bus commute, trying it. 15 min in, not sure it’s working for me.
They’ve been a lifesaver for me in the back of Ubers
> She uses Apple’s Vehicle Motion Cues now, too, because they’ve been a game changer for how we balance work with life on the road.
So the author is telling us they're having more work- and screen-time while on the road. Great, that sounds like exactly what we need...
That is exactly what passengers need so they can get work done during dead time and have more fun time available.
As someone with persistent BPPV, I need anti-nausea dots in life.
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.
It works for me too. Simple yet effektive.
Wait can I use it for rollercoasters?
Why the hell would you be using your phone during a goddamned rollercoaster ride?
It's terrifyingly common.
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’d do anything to reduce the motion sickness. I don’t have to hold the phone. I can bundle it on my arm.
I don’t get car sick (or small plane sick, haven’t ridden a big plane in decades or a train ever) and I don’t get roller coaster sick.
However, I can only ride one of those small fair rides that go in a circle or I will get sick.
Double-down on the thrill-seeking?
Hold the phone upside down for extra rollercoaster effect!
yeah this feature totally works for me, I've been using it for a few months now.
It’s incredible. It just works.
I love this feature.
Unlike many obvious inventions, this is novel enough to deserve patent protection.
Why? Volvo famously gave away seatbelts to everyone so that it benefits the humanity.
Why do you want something useful like this to be with a company? Isnt it better if everyone in the world benefitted from this?
My elderly mother paying $350/month for Eliquis (in the US) would love this sentiment.
Observation is not advocacy.
Oh wow, this is great!
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.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/ethics-statement
> 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.
[1] https://journalistikon.de/autorisierung/
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.
Weird title and article. Isn't that article the point of that feature? "Feature meant to do <x> did <x>. This and more later."
"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.
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I don't see how "car sickness" is real.
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.