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Vehicle Motion Cues
- JSR_FDED 2mo agoWorks surprisingly well, had a super sensitive passenger in the car the other day and zero signs of nausea.
- jdross 2mo agoOne of the best and most clever "hidden" features. Very Apple. I never get nauseous looking at my phone in an Uber anymore. My wife can barely handle looking at a screen in a car and this feature allows her to work with no issue.
- NateEag 2mo agoThere is a nice little app that does this on Android available on F-droid: https://f-droid.org/packages/dev.davidv.motionsickness https://f-droid.org/packages/dev.davidv.motionsickness
- globular-toast 2mo agoI tried this and it did nothing for me. For a start, the white dots disappear on a white background, so not a good start. The main thing, though, is while it picked up on the vehicle turning it didn't pick up on acceleration much, which is what actually gives me motion sickness.
- tacomagick 2mo agoThe biggest issue Android has both with Kinestop amd this app is unlike Apple's system it does not count for acceleration. I find myself having to look ahead when under acceleration or braking. I have experienced the Apple's motion cues when my friend got curious if it would work because he had no use for it since he did not have motion sickness and I'm unsure if it was just psychological but it felt better than Kinestop which I use.
- regularfry 2mo agoWhen did you try it? I got a bit confused by your comment because there's no obvious reason why the accelerometers in an android phone would have a problem reporting forward/backward acceleration any less accurately than lateral. So I installed it and the 'Dots' mode definitely responds to acceleration normal to the screen, but that mode is marked as 'New' so might not have been present when you last looked.
- tacomagick 2mo agoI had used it in my last bus trip around two months ago. It could be, I'll be testing it out in the future and hope the issues with it get resolves because for me there was no reaction to acceleration.
- deivid 2mo agoIt's supposed to handle acceleration though, if you bring your phone to your face quickly dots get larger. I've done some in-car testing, but things get squeamish quickly so it's not the easiest to validate. Changing the color / adding some contrast would be quite a simple change
- globular-toast 2mo agoI just tested and it does if I move my phone around violently. It would maybe work in sports car, but not regular driving, which can still make me sick.
- King-Aaron 2mo agoThis has been reposted here several times in the last few weeks, but it is a very neat feature. I find myself getting quite motion sick on the bus if I look at my phone, but these dots help me at least check messages here and there without immediately feeling like I'm going to throw up.
- neko_ranger 2mo agoThis is an easy enable with "Automatic Detection". Are there any other phone "Accessibility" options that are useful to everyone?
- duskwuff 2mo agoUnder "Display & Text Size": "on/off labels" and "increase contrast". "Reduce transparency" is a bit of a mixed bag but is worth trying out. Under "Audio & Visual", "background sounds" is a built-in 'white noise' generator and can be useful for relaxing / sleeping. You wouldn't want to leave it on all the time, of course. Under "Touch": "Back Touch" lets you map a double/triple tap on the back of the phone to various actions. There's a lot of other neat features in iOS Accessibility (eye-tracking control! automatic captions! sound recognition!) and I'd encourage you to poke around to see what's available.
- aprilnya 2mo agoAs for Reduce Transparency, next iOS version has a proper slider to adjust the transparency of Liquid Glass - worth playing with for anyone on the beta
- superb_dev 2mo agoI love the background sounds feature. You can add a shortcut in the control center to turn it on and off. I used it a ton when I lived in an apartment with particularly noisy neighbors
- Crespyl 2mo agoNot technically "Accessibility" but Android has a "developer" setting called "Show Touches" which puts little dots on screen when you touch it. I find it acts a little like being able to see the cursor on a desktop or laptop; it provides a little bit of immediate feedback that the system recognized your intent, and helps make it clear whether it's the OS or just the app when things are getting laggy.
- hidroto 2mo ago
- Centigonal 2mo agoI just found out this capability is also available on Macbooks! This would have saved me a lot of grief during a recent road trip through some mountains. https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/change-motion-settings-for-accessibility-mchla3c4f1da/mac https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/change-motion-setti...
- yonatan8070 2mo agoVery cool that apple made it I wonder if any other laptops have IMUs that can be used to implement this on Linux/Windows
- fletchowns 2mo agoIt works great on Macbook. I don't know why they don't suggest it to folks when car or train movement is detected! I have a feeling a lot of people don't know it exists. I wish my Pixel 9 had it but I guess it hasn't trickled down yet. I think it's in the latest Android on latest Pixel devices though.
- Rohansi 2mo ago> I wish my Pixel 9 had it but I guess it hasn't trickled down yet. You don't need to wait. You can get apps that do the same thing on Android.
- embedding-shape 2mo ago> I don't know why they don't suggest it to folks when car or train movement is detected Apple whole idea to UX seems to be "Mostly hidden by default, let people trigger it accidentally to learn about it, or reading about it somewhere else" as even after having my iPhone 12 Mini for so long, I still "discover" new things every now and then that nothing or no one told me about. Like how are people supposed to "discover" the whole "shake the phone to undo" shortcut unless they accidentally trigger that? I see nothing in the UI that indicates when this is possible either, some apps use that for reporting feedback instead.
- 2mo ago
- sssilver 2mo agoI have no idea how something like this is ideated, then prototyped, then validated, but it does work wonders for me, and I am so grateful it exists.
- latexr 2mo agoSeems pretty straightforward. 1. Be a developer and you (or a spouse/child/friend) get motion sickness when looking at the phone while travelling. 2. We’ve known the mechanisms of motion sickness (looking at something static while your inner ear indicates you’re moving) from before smartphones were a thing. 3. We already have a ton of information on the phone to know when we’re in a vehicle, how fast we’re moving, direction, so on. 4. Try adding something to the static screen so it moves in tandem with you and thus reduce the cause of motion sickness. 5. Get the people who get sick to try it out. If anything, I’m surprised it took a decade and a half to come up with it.
- taevirus 2mo agoThank you bro!
- usrusr 2mo agoAnd this is exactly how things in large corporations don't happen. Things in large corporations who pay so well that nobody makes it through the recruitment filters and competition who's more than 2% off from being a pure assessment metrics maximiser. In my mind, chasing an idea like this just does not match the type. Why it isn't likely to have happened before: trying is only easy for a developer who is not only very familiar with the API for reading those motion sensors but also with the API for system wide overlay. This a strict no for your run of the mill to-do list app. Combine that with the requirement of being affected themselves (or someone close), having the idea, having the time to try and no competing side quests that take up all attention. And the requirement of when the experiment was successful, having the kind of access that actually serves as a conduit for ideas not only on paper to someone in the position to make it a product. That's a lot of stars that need to align. Personally I wouldn't even be surprised if there was an LLM angle: would still need someone in the know to try it, but chances are that knowledge combined with a bit of prompting could be a path to PoC implementation that could clear effort thresholds that would stand in the way of conventional coding.
- esperent 2mo agoMy Android phone has this too (Vivo). Maybe they all do? It wasn't well explained what it was for though, I discovered it while messing with the settings and thought it was just a cool random feature to visualize motion. I'm just now learning it's for motion sickness.
- wongarsu 2mo agoHonor phones have this in the quick settings (the thing that opens when you slide the right side of the top bar down), labeled "Motion Sickness". Felt well-explained and discoverable. But the beauty and pain of Android is every brand having slightly different UI. This might well be a manufacturer-specific feature. Or maybe it's a common Android thing that some brands just expose better than others
- esperent 2mo agoOn Vivo it's called "Motion Cues". Subtitle: "Dots shift forwards and backwards during acceleration and deceleration". And then it says in tiny font it's for motion sickness, I guess I didn't read that far last time.
- orbital-decay 2mo agoThis was invented long ago in an app, it got cloned in other apps, vendors paid attention and made it a built-in feature. Same as Swype.
- myself248 2mo agoThis should've been possible with the Thinkpad HDAPS accelerometer back in the day. (If it detected the laptop was falling, it would park the HDD heads in anticipation of impact.) Shame nobody thought of it then!
- disillusioned 2mo agoWere a lot of people rawdogging their Thinkpads while driving back in the day? Plugged into an inverter into the cigarette lighter to trickle charge? :-)
- ga_to 2mo agoPassengers already existed back then, which this intended for. The motion cues are not meant to decrease motion sickness for a driver doom scrolling on their phone while operating their vehicle.
- myself248 2mo agoI've had 12-volt-input power supplies for every laptop I've ever owned. Lind makes the most reliable ones, but they're expensive, and there's a thriving aftermarket of alternatives too. Also, Lind is the brand you're likely to find sold alongside an ex-public-safety Toughbook. Since these were my first serious car computers, that's just how the majority of my mobile computing looked for a decade or more. However, Toughbooks encased their HDD's in gel, and had been doing so since long before the advent of MEMS accelerometers, so they didn't jump on the HDAPS innovation along with IBM.
- reywilliams 2mo agon=1, but it works great for me!
- d--b 2mo agoThe question I have is whether a phone with motion cues causes less nausea than no phone at all in a window-less boat.
- michelb 2mo agoIt did for me, but n=1.
- zyz 2mo agoA related post from last month: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48557530 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48557530 Sharing this here in case anyone wants to check out the discussion there and see how it looks in the Verge's short review.
- atorodius 2mo agoI use this a lot on my MacBook Air when working in cabs. It’s beautiful and works well for me
- oasisbob 2mo agoI'm curious how this feature chooses to turn itself on with automatic detection. Somehow managed to fool it the other day by shutting a car trunk, helping someone load up, with me on the outside. It activated the dots for the rest of my walk afterwards, when I was using the phone. I get the impression there are much more sophisticated signals and classification methods to determine whether someone is in a vehicle or not, beyond the accelerometers.
- parkersweb 2mo agoI always assumed this is triggered by Bluetooth connection to the car?
- aflinik 2mo agoIt triggers for me on trains too, so I think it's just accelerometer + location
- norbert515 2mo agoI would assume the acceleration pattern of being in a vehicle is somewhat distinct. I'd be curious what happens when you are in a vehicle that drives completely steady (no turns/acceleration/deceleration) - would it eventually turn off? I guess you wouldn't get motion sick in that case either way.
- pta2002 2mo agoI've used it on trains a bit and it does turn off when the train is going straight ahead. You might be going 200km/h, but if the speed isn't changing and you're always going forward you don't really feel any force, and neither does the phone, so the dots don't need to be there any more.
- hav 2mo agoIt’s likely based on motion through the gyro/accelerometers, it triggers on any vehicle I’ve tried. Works wonders on trains and subways as well.
- ascorbic 2mo agoThere was a discussion about this a few weeks ago, where I discovered KineStop which is an app that does the same on Android. I've only tried it a few times but it has worked every time.
- wongarsu 2mo agoWorth checking first whether your phone already has this natively. My one year old Android by Honor has it built in and exposed in the quick settings (sliding the right down). I know a couple others also have it, but not all of them as discoverable
- Cider9986 2mo agoI use KineStop and it works better than Apple's version on iOS did for me. Hopefully AOSP implements one because you do have to give KineStop rather invasive permissions. Eventually I will try the open source offerings.
- crossroadsguy 2mo agoMotion sickness person here. iPhone’s stock one doesn’t work for me. Haven’t tried that on Android. Will see if something similar is available on iOS as third party app.
- wffurr 2mo agoThere's also glasses for this that put a fluid filled tube in your peripheral vision. I want to try it next time I'm on a sailboat and have to do something inside the boat while it's pitching.
- warrenmiller 2mo agoAny reason this doesn’t work in CarPlay?
- GuB-42 2mo agoJust speculation here. CarPlay is intended to be used on the dashboard, so you already have the view of the road as a reference, and these dots may be considered a distraction to the driver.
- mohammedmsgm 2mo ago[flagged]
- pilif 2mo agoOnce this was announced a few years back, I was very skeptical that a few dots on the screen would be all that's needed to help me. And yet, apparently it was. It's not perfect, but the dots help me to go from instantly feeling sick to lasting 30-40 minutes before I have to stop looking at the screen.
- consp 2mo agoIs this related to roll and pitch motion in sea sickness where by knowing the horizon and direction of travel can help?
- wuming2 2mo agoWould it also work onboard a ship? Or movements are too slow to provide enough visual cues on a small screen.
- texruska 2mo ago[dead]
- willyyr 2mo agoIt absolutely is working on a ship. At least for me it helps e.g. when traveling on a big ferry etc. but I guess everybody has a different level of tolerance.
- wuming2 2mo agoInterested because this autumn will board a ferry for an overnight journey. Sometimes I did suffer seasickness and have read taking medication when onboard already is too late. So I am happy to know there may be a potential solution available. Just in case. Thanks.
- Piterniel 2mo agoIn case you have a problem with the iPhone performance, make sure inside settings disable `Dynamic` pattern for this feature. iPhone 12 Pro (26.5.2)
- Tempest1981 2mo agoI like the "bubbling" dots effect that occurs in an airplane when making a turn. Anyone know the reason? I guess they're moving in the opposite direction of the turn to force the perception of turning.
- DonHopkins 2mo agoCan you play back virtual time shifted vehicle motion cues, to make yourself barf on demand? This could be a godsend for bulemics. Accessibility at its finest.
- firefoxd 2mo agoThese are the type of problems that are completely invisible to someone who doesn't experience it. I wouldn't have even known it was a problem to solve. A few years back we played an escape room game online with the whole team. One of the clues was in one of my colleagues "room". All he had to do was read it. "Come one read it man, we can win this." He froze. We all insisted he reads it. He could not read it. We thought he had an internet connection issue. Somehow we managed to escape the room and kept going. The next day he told me he was embarrassed because he couldn't understand what we were talking about. He could not see the note we were talking about because he is colorblind.
- albedoa 2mo ago> He could not see the note we were talking about because he is colorblind. A similar thing happened to a friend who was over for game night. We were playing the Monopoly Deal card game when he put a brown and a red card next to each other with kind of a confused silence. Look at this: https://static.wixstatic.com/media/374991_dc4dfa2a6f0d4ebb8144e51fb3f02325~mv2.jpg https://static.wixstatic.com/media/374991_dc4dfa2a6f0d4ebb81... (Pictured: Three red property cards next to two brown property cards.) They use only color to indicate property group. I was surprised that such a recognizable brand would allow this to get through. About one in twelve men cannot play this game without assistance.
- thi2 2mo agoAt my first job our project manager was colorblind (red-orange/yellow). One day he dropped a photo of his cars dashboard at a red light with an orange "check engine light" > "Quick, is this red or orange I need to know if it'll blow". I'm sure it's a really annoying condition but at the time it was pretty funny and he joked around with it a lot
- behringer 2mo agogoogle lens can probably answer these kinds of questions for him, but uh, he should be aware not to trust his car blowing up with AI!
- dzhiurgis 2mo agoWonder if Tesla should add something like this to rear screen. It’s not very useful for most adults due to how low it is, but kids willing to get screen time on anything (not that I condone).
- aqme28 2mo agoI wish this worked a little better. It doesn't solve motion sickness for me when looking at my phone in a car, but it does seem to make it a little less severe.
- romulobribeiro 2mo agoSaw someone using this on the train, looked cool
- mynameyeff 2mo agoIt's pretty cool but it does hog CPU a bit.
- m-s-y 2mo ago[flagged]
- devandanger 2mo agoI think this is a good example of how Apple is doing well in the application of AI and also uncharacteristically doing poorly in the application of AI. Doing well as it quietly is coming up with helpful product updates like this which are buried in support docs and limited splash. I kind of prefer this more quiet usage of application of AI.
- avycado13 2mo agoThis feature has helped me so much since i found it. I have kinda bad motion sickness and this has really helped me
- mplanchard 2mo agoI have been too nervous to really try using the phone as a passenger in a car, but it has also activated for me on trains and planes, where I suffer less from motion sickness anyway. Not enough experience yet to say for sure whether they work, but the dots look so cool that I will keep it on regardless.
- cloverich 2mo agoSuper helpful for me. Also insightful: on trains, when the train stops completely, the dots begin moving in reverse for a few moments. Staring at them in these moments helps me quite a bit, and also teaches me to visualize the disconnect in what i feel from what is happening and my bodies inability to account for it.
- JSR_FDED 2mo agoAnother super useful feature is Accessibility > Zoom > Use keyboard shortcuts. The you can use Command+Option+Plus and Command+Option+Minus to zoom the entire screen. It’s a great way to zoom in on anything regardless of whether an app supports it or not. Sometimes I help family members remotely and look through a bad camera at a document on their side, and applying this zoom makes the difference between being able to decipher the content and not.
- bicepjai 2mo agoI was so skeptical of this feature, now I cannot live without this.
- Arkkis 2mo agoHow about VR glasses? Could similar approach help there?