Apple's weird anti-nausea dots cured my car sickness

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.

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

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.

You might ask why motion sickness even exists in the first place. Why do nausea and vomiting make sense when your body is in a car or on a boat? Nobody knows for sure, but there's a convincing theory.

Zillions of years ago, we were foragers. We ate what we found. And if we ate something bad, like a poisonous berry, we could die. One of the first symptoms of neurotoxin ingestion is that your eyes lose their tracking ability. And an easy way for your body to detect this is when your eyes and ears (vestibular system) disagree about your body's position and motion in space.

So we presumably evolved a simple rule:

    if (eyes != ears) { vomit(); }

This is why these Android and Apple gadgets work: they restore visual cues helping your eyes match what your ears are telling you. It's why looking at the horizon on a boat helps. And it's why reading in the car gets some people so horribly sick.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

During long road trips, back before iPhones and the like, my mom would have us pick out a book and buy it for us to read to keep us entertained while driving.

That worked fine for me, I've never gotten carsick, but for my sister could never do that; after reading for not much time, she would start feeling nauseous. Initially I think my parents thought she was exaggerating to get attention, but eventually she puked in the car because of it and they suddenly had no issue believing her.

It eventually led to them buying a cheap TV/VCR combo and a cheap power inverter for the cigarette lighter and using that for road trips, which didn't seem to bother her very much.

I 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.

It helps, doesn't completely cure it for me but makes looking at google maps / iMessage more bearable. Not reading essays yet though.

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 have this on 24/7. I like them even when I'm not driving.

Weird, I get extra car sick when I use those. The only way I can consistently not be sick is when I drive.

It’s incredible. It just works.

Has worked very well for my wife who notably couldn’t look at her phone for even a few seconds without feeling ill

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.

> 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...

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.

I don't get car sick looking at a screen in a car, but my daughter very quickly does. Excited to set this up for her to see if it helps her, especially with our annual US Independence Day car trip coming up.

Can this same idea be extrapolated to a device that emits concentrated beams onto the surface of a book?

I'm thinking of those clip-on lights for books that allow one to read in the dark, but for this purpose explicitly. My daughter also gets car sick reading paper books while in a moving vehicle.

I get really bad motion sickness, I tried reading hacker news in the car with these on when the feature first appeared. It didn't help.

Saw this before the evening bus commute, trying it. 15 min in, not sure it’s working for me.

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.

Has anyone made a Linux version of this yet? I think Framework laptops and many thinkpads have accelerometers.

> to reduce or, in my case, even eliminate the motion sickness felt when trying to use an iPhone, iPad, or MacBook inside a moving vehicle.

Does it also help people who get carsick without looking at a screen?

I get carsick in pretty much any modern car, unless I'm the one driving.

I 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?

As someone with persistent BPPV, I need anti-nausea dots in life.

I wonder if this might work for my sickness with 3D apps and games on desktop. Even watching Minecraft is nauseating

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'll have to try this out. I've gotten motion sickness while using a phone in the car and I swear it continued to affect me for weeks.

Do they have a boat version of this?

I get car sick easily but on open water I have to sit and watch the horizon or it's adios cookies.

Had no idea this was a thing. Have always gotten car sick anytime I'm not driving. They sold me lol

It works for me too. Simple yet effektive.

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?

Oh wow, this is great!

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.

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.

Wait can I use it for rollercoasters?

I love stories like these. Lots of accessibility features like these dots are sort of conceptually very simple and potentially quite weird ideas, IMHO, but when they work, they work like magic. I have a big soft spot for things that make it more comfortable or even possible in the first place to operate a device, whether a user is disabled or not.

Is this from a press release? It's a substance-free product endorsement.

Unlike many obvious inventions, this is novel enough to deserve patent protection.