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Comment by eknkc | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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).

> 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2008 when a third-party utility finally was able to leverage the accessibility features to fix OS X's broken, decades-out-of-date window resizing, I said in a blog post[1]: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

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.

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.

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

I think it's only for the parallax effect.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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'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.

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 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.

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