Apple's weird anti-nausea dots cured my car sickness
theverge.com
theverge.com
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
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.
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!
There is an automatic mode that works perfectly for me.
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.
She also got motion sickness until she turned on the Apple dots.
edit: clarity
They're entirely placebos, so that might be why.
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
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!?).
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.
The crazy thing is if I focus on the dots (versus the text behind them), my nausea comes back.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
I can't vouch for it (yet) but am going to give it a try!
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.
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
My only guess is some sort of processing, like wait and see if it follows the expected acceleration pattern (moderate initial acceleration from the unexpected-to-the-user car motion, followed by a stronger acceleration in the same direction as one's hands push the phone to keep it in the same visual place) but I'd assume such lag is precisely the issue VR etc. has and makes people extra sick. By the time you've counteracted it, your brain has clearly registered that the movement is disjointed from the visual input, so then it's too late for them dots to help right?! That couldn't possibly work (or could it). Very curious how this works. Like, surely it doesn't need to be connected to a compatible car?
Edit: wait, or the camera. That would be very battery-intensive (I guess theoretically it could turn on only 1% of 1 color channel on the sensor, but I'm not aware that this is a mode that the hardware/firmware supports), but when you move it yourself, then the camera would see motion in the opposite direction as when you're unexpectedly being moved such as in a car. Still seems unlikely
Apple uses the derivative (i.e. rate of change) of acceleration, while all the other (ineffective, in my experience) third-party apps simply use acceleration.
People with motion sickness can deal with speed just fine. While relaxing on an equatorial beach, you’ll have no qualms hurtling around the poles at 1600 km/h.
Acceleration is also perfectly fine for motion sickness. Most people are being pulled towards the centre of the earth at 1.0 G with no complaints whatsoever.
But the significance during motion sickness is the rate of change of the rate of change. That thing where the vehicle slows down, turns a corner, goes over a bump.
This is why Apple’s motion cues actually work, because they use what actually matters for motion sickness.
> 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
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.
Apple will be doing full 6 DoF sensor fusion, and then processing the result in a different way.
(The reason the permission is so dangerous is they can trick you into pressing the wrong button by relabeling dangerous text with innocuous text.)
Or, it would be wild, if it weren't fairly obvious that this is just Google protecting their mobile ad revenue.
Apps that are solely relying on analytics still tend to function when the analytics are unreachable.
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.
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
but even something like "share via Chat app" can be used to leak information, e.g. it will have the link preview loaded".
Cronet? Isn't that Chromium's networking library? How's that letting apps connect via Google Play Services?
That solved the problem of ads in games much better than DNS :D
It's mostly just Devs copying apples feature, nothing too weird about it
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.
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.
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.
You read something, get reminded you have car sickness, then look out of the window to try to cure it and not vomit
Now you know why radio buttons are called that in modern UIs.
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
But I used to get sick playing Quake, so maybe I'm in the 11 group.
You might still die, so don't eat poison berries please.
(I have also been on bumpy flights, no issues whatsoever, even when reading a book at the same time.)
I would need to ask her if she gets motion sickness.
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.
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.
if (areEyesDetectingMotion != isBodyDetectingMotion) vomit()
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.
FIX THE CODE!
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.
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.
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.
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.
He only had to wear them for a week or two before his motion sickness from cars was completely cured. Now he can just use his phone, without the glasses, in the car whenever he wants
I suffer from motion sickness. It sucks. I'll try anything. If those goofy glasses work, I'll wear them.
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?
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.
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.
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.
There's a non-drowsy anti-sickness formula out now called meclizine, but I found it to be less effective.
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.
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.
Isn't it a better "cure" to look out the window rather than stare at a screen?
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.
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).
Anyway I can't tolerate a dependency on drugs at sea, at least not on my boat.
1: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/motion-sickness-g...
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'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.
This is on Tahoe, not sure about earlier versions.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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:
Definitely worth a shot IMO.
I get car sick easily but on open water I have to sit and watch the horizon or it's adios cookies.
I don’t think it’s actually driving specific, I think it just is based on the accelerometer. So it might work.
(am highly succeptible to motion sickness, i generally have the feature on at all times).
One simple question detects motion sickness susceptibility in migraine patients: While riding in a car or bus, can you read without getting motion sick?
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.
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!
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.
Ginger does help although not as much as I'd like. Eating in general does as well but even less than ginger.
Do you find it is more/less effective on different kinds of devices?
Personally, I find it somewhat less effective on larger screens, simply because my eyes are more likely to be further from the dots.
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.
So you might be right, but it can't be tested.
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!
Please do not look at your phone screen while driving the car.
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...
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.
However, I can only ride one of those small fair rides that go in a circle or I will get sick.
Why do you want something useful like this to be with a company? Isnt it better if everyone in the world benefitted from this?
This article is actually the first time I've heard of this feature and I follow Apple news a lot, so I appreciate it.
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.
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.
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.