Why iOS 7 is making some users sick | Hacker News Reader

Why iOS 7 is making some users sick

theguardian.com

56 pointsjarofgreen60 comments

I'm honestly curious about this, not trolling or something;

How can a person survive the daily life if a couple of animations on a screen makes them sick? What I mean is, if the zoom effect makes someone dizzy I'd expect them to be dizzy around moving cars, approaching trains or watching sports, playing games etc..

But it seems that this is common enough. Is it the bright small screen itself causing such an issue? You know like some people getting nauseous when they read in a car. Or is it just that 3D effects?

usually it is when the movement perceived from sight doesn't match what sense of balance tells you. so you get sick while reading in a car in the back seat but not when riding in the front...

Which is maybe why one of the things that can help with seasickness is watching the horizon, so that what you see with your eyes starts to match what your body feels as the boat pitches around.

My father suffers from this (and vertigo if that's any correlation). For him, it's when perspective and shape transformations don't compare to reality. This is something that 2d graphics pretending to do 3d transformations is pretty good at screwing up.

He can sit at quake 3 for an hour fine, but the effects in osx make him feel sick (so he turns them off).

Edit: I just emailed him and iOS 7 is doing his nut in as well. He's switched back to his 4S with iOS 6 on it.

I also played Dooms and Quakes with no problem. It's hard to explain, Dooms and Quakes do move "consistently" the bad UI animations have something "uncanny." Just as an example the original "rubber band" animation in iOS is perfect, "natural," (the stuff reacts exactly as it should according to your actions) the iOS 7 Safari "animated buttonbar and urlbar slide" or Windows "hiding and showing taskbar" or "hidden menus" in old MS Offices just unnatural when you're doing something opposite.

Interestingly enough, iOS didn't have any "distracting" animation (for me) until iOS 7. Nothing that I'd wish to turn off. It was just "slick" and "natural." It also had that "stability" of the interface -- once you see something then nothing disappears or moves "just so" or "creepily on its own" only as the result of your actions, so nothing had the "creepy unnatural slides or transitions" whereas Windows was full of exactly such ones since at least XP. I always believed it was only "MS just doesn't have taste." I think Jobs somehow had that deeper feeling how the things should behave (that can be traced back I think even to the influences from his work on video games with Wozniak as he was young -- knowing that the movement can be synced "properly" even with the slow processors and CRT screens, if you really care about it) and now the people who do implement the transitions don't do it to that "ultimate naturalness" goal.

I once had a housemate that would occasionally watch me play doomlikes, but she couldn't do it for long as it gave her motion-sickness, particularly with strafing moves.

Did he try Settings > General > Accessibility > Reduce Motion? I don't have that particular problem but still like that option because several of the motion effects — most notably icon parallax — aren't implemented well enough to make it out of the uncanny valley.

Have asked him to try that but he's just disappeared away from home for a week without the 5 and doesn't want to break the 4s.

As a kid, I used to suffer from motion sickness in cars.. If I didn't look out of the window, my mind told me one thing, my body another, and I'd be sick. I suspect this is the same. I really like IOS7, but the zoom in/out makes me feel mildly uncomfortable. It might be that I'm experiencing a mild case.

I used to get car sick as a kid. I haven't felt queasy from motion in over a decade. IOS 7 was the first thing that brought that feeling back. I think the problem isn't so much with motion as it is with the unnatural motions. You move the tablet, and the background only shifts a moment later. You rotate the tablet, and the rotation of the screen isn't smooth but jerky. IOS is very tactile. In IOS 6, I felt like I was moving things around. In IOS 7, the lag and jerkiness make it feel somehow wrong.

Either way, I suspect Apple will either want to release an update which gets rid of the lagginess and jerkiness, allow the user to disable animations, or face an ADA class-action lawsuit.

If they do plan to fix this, I wish they'd go against convention, and pre-announce it. I need to know whether I should replace the iPad with a Nexus 10 (something I've been considering regardless; I have a Nexus 4, which is wonderful; but hasn't been worth the $$$).

Somehow, the Surface, which has much the same feel as the IOS 7 in terms of being a little bit slow, laggy, and occasionally stalling out, doesn't suffer this fate.

(I have an iPad 3; and iPad 4 is twice as fast, so perhaps it doesn't suffer from this problem).

Something's wrong with your setup I think. I have an iPad mini with much less power than an iPad 3 and there is never any lag to speak of with the ios7 animations. Parallax works exactly as it would in real physics to my eyes. Maybe take it in to the apple store and say it's performing slower than it should?

The iPad 3 is pushing 4x the number of pixels as the iPad mini as it's retina. I'm not surprised by this at all.

Makes sense! Didn't think of that.

You can already disable the effects; go into accessibility settings and select "Reduce Motion".

I think it's only for the parallax effect.

> I suspect Apple will either want to release an update which gets rid of the [crap] or face an ADA class-action lawsuit.

That would be terrific, and it wouldn't be the first time that regular users got a great boost from efforts to help the disabled. OS X sucked in all sorts of ways too, until they really got their Accessibility story dialed in.

To be one of those awesome guys who quotes himself, back in 2008 when a third-party utility finally was able to leverage the accessibility features to fix OS X's broken, decades-out-of-date window resizing, I said in a blog post[1]:

    > That seems to me to be an entirely legitimate use of
    > the Mac's Universal Access capabilities, albeit a 
    > little backwards: in this case, it's the computer that's
    > crippled, not the user.

Apple, of course, eventually fixed window-resizing (in 10.7 I believe), and I suspect that they will eventually fix some of these iOS 7 issues, too. But sooner would be better. You don't have to get physically sick to be really sick of seeing some of these too-long/jarring/useless animation effects.

[1]: http://masonmark.com/power-windows-for-your-mac

They've had an accessibility setting since release which allows you to reduce motion. It's a surprisingly big aesthetic win since the effects do nothing useful but distractingly fake.

> How can a person survive the daily life if a couple of animations on a screen makes them sick? What I mean is, if the zoom effect makes someone dizzy I'd expect them to be dizzy around moving cars, approaching trains or watching sports, playing games etc..

The same way people with absolute hearing survive. It's just a different way of perception. Some people respond different to their senses not agreeing on something. In nature all your senses agree (the train is coming, my two ears are giving the right audio feedback, my eyes agree on the visuals, I feel the wind etc.). In many simulations some things are off and some people respond to that with sickness.

Real world such as seeing approaching trains or being in one isn't a problem - the sickness manifests only when the "seen reality" doesn't match "felt reality", i.e., when a display tries to fake reality. Reading in a car might be similar, yes - if you are feeling the movement change but you are so engrossed that your eyes tell that you don't seem to be moving. Games and movies would cause problems only if they're "too immersive" - small screens and unrealistic graphics wouldn't cause it, but a 3d screen all around you would.

My (completely unverified) opinion is that there is a solid evolutionary basis for this - I mean, if your vestibular system gives different movement perception than your visual system, then that usually (in older times 100% ?) is a common symptom of poisoning, probably caused by some psychoactive substance in something you ate, and vomiting is an appropriate built-in reaction to try to mitigate that poisoning.

I remember some yeArs ago the "back to the future" attractio. In universal make some peopple sick. Ecaise the phisical movements didnt match perfectly the screen movements.

I'm not at all professionally qualified to answer that, but I would have to guess that it's the exact reverse of motion sickness. With motion sickness I common cause (or at least in me) is from reading in the car. In that scenario you are focused on something stationary while your senses all feel as though you are being propelled down the road. In this case you are focused on what honestly looks to me like a standard animation of a wormhole, while everything else is telling you that you are stationary.

The problem with this thought (thought of it while typing but too late to turn back) is that if focusing on something like a half second wormhole animation while sitting still makes you sick for the reason I suggested, then you probably wouldn't be able to do other basic things like watch television.

I'm not bashing Apple at all. Never said anything negative about them before, but I can say this. I've had an iPhone, an iPhone 3GS, an iPhone 4, and an iPhone 5. I've used iOS, 2.X.X, 3.X.X, 4X.X, 5.X.X, and 6.1. I have seen iOS7 but didn't install it. If 7.1 looks like 7, this will be my last iPhone.

I have never been able to watch or play any 3d games since Wolfenstein 3D.

I would love to join the fun, but after 3 or 4 minutes I become very pale, sweaty and nautious.

My grandmother can't spin, even slowly, without getting sick. And I don't mean as an old woman, as a young woman it kept her completely out of dancing. Even a single, 360 degree movement over 2 or 3 seconds would put her in full-on motion sickness.

Yet she never got car sick, sea sick or air sick.

My wife, who also pretty much doesn't get motion sick in a car, gets violently sea and air sick and can't handle even a few seconds of an FPS game.

Motion effects affect people in a really wide variety of ways.

The way it works is that inner ear has an 'accelerometer' that can detect if you are in motion. If you are not, but you are perceiving motion (e.g. computer games or the iPhone animation) your brain notices the difference between reality and perception and assumes that you are hallucinating e.g. from poisoning and therefore makes you sick so that you throw up the poison.

I find all of these visual effects to be disorienting... And superfluous at best. I was closing my eyes when switching apps for the first few days also. I'm disappointed Apple provided no way to disable the zoom animation - just like I would on a desktop OS, the first thing I tried to do was disable that option. The parallax scrolling of the icons over the background when the phone is titled on the home screen is bizarre. I'm not sure what Apple intends there.

Yes, I felt a bit ill during the first day but I have since got used to it. However, I think it's mainly because I've subconsciously learnt to not pay attention during the animations.

I don't have that problem myself, but just watching the videos of iOS7 made me think I'd be very frustrated to see all those 1 second animations long everytime I do something. I don't think I could handle seeing those animations hundreds of times every day, and for a couple of years of owning the device.

I want my phone to do stuff fast, especially if it has a benchmark-breaking chip inside. What's the point of having such a fast chip, if you can't feel it's fast in everyday use?

Whoever is in charge of the design of iOS7 clearly had no coherent vision about what iOS should do, like Scott Forestall (and Steve Jobs) did. The UI is all over the place, and it seems filled with random design gimmicks of the 2005-era (translucency, parallax, zooming in and out, very bright colors, etc) to make it "feel cool" or whatever. Reminds me of Vista and all of those crazy Linux environments.

I want my OS to help me do stuff fast, and productively, not show me a circus on the screen, with everything I do.

Settings.app > General > Accessibility > Reduce Motion

Doesn't remove all the whsihy in and out of Springboard.app ones though, so you'll have to wait for a jailbreak to be completely animation-free.

Can't find the setting on iphone 4 running 7.0.2

I think those animations are disabled by default on the iPhone 4.

I guess the animations are already reduced on the iPhone 4 due to Hardware limitations.

How do you find overall ios7 performance on the iPhone 4? I have a 4 but am reluctant to upgrade to ios7, fearing it may be too slow on the hardware.

It's slow at times even on the most recent iPad. >5 seconds of complete non-responsiveness when you change a wallpaper, for example.

My two cents: don't do it. Sickly slow.

Is this iOS 4 on the 3G all over? My wife refuses to ever update iOS because she saw what happened to my 3G (it became so slow it was barely usable)...

The real shame is that you can't install 7 and, if you don't like it, reinstall 6. Apple's head is up their ass when it comes to allowing people to install older versions of iOS.

Animations are slow, but not prohibitively bad. I don't like the style though, and wish i could go back easily.

Normally I am usually very susceptible to motion sickness from FPS games, reading in cars/trains and theme park rides which can all easily make me feel like throwing up, but I've not had effects of any degree from using iOS 7 since the very first betas.

I often have trouble watching many FPS games much less playing them. Been using iOS7 since the early betas and I never even considered any of this an issue, nor did any of my coworkers many of whom upgraded early as well. The parallax view is a pretty pointless trick. I wonder how much of this is real and how much is suggested by all the articles? It's hard to imagine that a real problem wouldn't have been seen by people at Apple and all the developers who like me have used it for months. It's strange to think a small device's virtual motion could cause that much reaction.

Perhaps these people are looking at it wrong?

Same for me. I get sick travelling and playing video games but I've been using iOS 7 since June and never had a problem.

As someone mentioned elsewhere, what affects someone is going to vary from person to person. I've been lucky that iOS 7 hasn't bother me, considering I am the type of person who can't read in a moving vehicle.

The primary culprit is the app zooming effect, which can be rather disconcerting for users. Hopefully Apple will supply an update allowing one to toggle that particular animation off.

I remember getting severe motion sickness the first time I ever saw Doom being played, and again with Quake, although those passed with time. It's very unpleasant!

Stay as far away from the Oculus Rift as you can, then...

Oh yeah, I got over that nausea very quickly. I do wanna check out the Oculus!

I feel some of the symptoms myself! Not as strong as some descriptions in the article, but definitely I do.

I have an older iPhone with iOS 7, so I don't see the parallax, but as I wanted to talk about the parallax effect with somebody, I've searched for video with the parallax effect on YouTube -- and just watching the video made me feel slightly sick. Maybe holding the phone in the hand and seeing the parallax as the response of my own motions wouldn't produce the same effect but that video did. "OK it moves, now more under it should be visible, ah it's not" -- it hit some kind of an "uncanny" by me.

Second, I have big problems with automatic sliding of the lower tabbar and upper urlbar in and out in Safari. For example I keep the finger on the text, wanting to scroll, but I read the top part of the page -- now the movement that should enable me to see more of what I'm looking at effectively causes the sliding in the opposite direction exactly obscuring what I want to see. So this effect where I do something in order to see more but the "automatic sliding" kicks in and "helpfully" obscures exactly what I'm trying to see also produces a strange feeling. I can't call it dizziness but certainly a conflicting one.

Safari in iOS 6 never had such effects -- "obscuring" against the actions of the user never happened.

Otherwise I don't have problems with iOS 7 animations, except that general impression that they take "too long," after using iOS 6. But maybe it's only on the older phones so.

I find it rather bizarre, that for all the talk of flat design, simplifying, getting the interface out of the way, etc. in iOS 7 -- they upped both the "in-your-face"-ness and the duration of the animations. The effects don't make me sick or anything, but the zooming in and out of apps and folders seems just as superfluous and distracting as leather stitching ever was.

The parallax and blur effects can be turned off in the preferences (enabling high contrast disables the blur effect for example). If memory serves correctly both settings can be found in the accessibility tab.

Article says:

"The lack of a solution is the bigger problem. Apple provides a "Reduce Motion" option within the iOS 7 Settings app, but it is poorly labelled; it merely disables the parallax effect, but doesn't stop zooming or sliding. Apple did not respond to requests for comment for this article. Which for now, leaves affected people on their own."

(I haven't got iOS7 so can't check)

That's right, just the parallax effects are gone. The main annoying ones that take a full second or so are the ones in the unlock screen, and they can't be disabled.

Right. It is labeled badly. The "Increase Contrast" options is even more badly labeled because it in part increases contrast by disabling blur. I think that Apple does not want an explicit "Disable Blur" setting because down the road the blur effect may become outdated again. Then they had to rename the setting again. So I can see the reasoning: They name the settings after what their effect is not how those settings are implemented.

I just get the feeling that someone at Apple probably should have spoken up but didn't. Who's going to tell Jony Ive that his UX might be causing motion sickness.

I think that if nobody had spoken up, the "Reduce Motion" option wouldn't even exist (or bold text, for that matter).

As far as I know, "Reduce Motion" only turns off the parallax effect which as the article states, is NOT the problem.

But I'll concede that it's possible that simply nobody at Apple experienced any sort of motion sickness so they all gave it the thumbs up.

I can't wait for presbyopia to hit Jony Ive. The clock on the lock screen was nearly unreadable without my glasses until I found the bold text setting.

I've already toggled "Reduce Motion" on, not because the movement was making me ill, but just because I thought the effect looked somehow bad. The parallax effect on the homescreen is nice enough, but far too subtle to justify having to also look at the dumb wiggling modals that it produces. I'd be interested in hearing if other people find the effect genuinely pleasant to look at.

> ...with icons apparently floating above subtly animating wallpaper

Now I'm wondering if I have a vision problem I didn't previously know about. I've been unimpressed with the upgrade myself, and one of my biggest complaints is that everything looks so flat that I have a hard time telling text and icons from the background.

I wish I could see it live, on videos I find it cool and unsickening. It reminds me of holograms (probably mathematically similar), or the eye focus over interference patterns trick in physics book which let you see depth on a flat surface, again very similar to iOS7 parallax.

These people are going to have a really hard time with Oculus Rift. Sucks to be them.

I, for one, do not believe these complaints at all. But, I cannot speak for others. I just don't feel that the field is large enough, and the exposure is long enough, to actually disorientate or to confuse one's equilibrium.

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