How iOS 18 Will Solve Carsickness
Until recently, I’ve been the lone backseat passenger in my family road trips to far away destinations, and if you’re anything like me, you also can only look out the window for so long. So, after some time, I have to bring out my heavily Gen Z-inspired arsenal of entertainment: a great book that will go absolutely untouched and my phone. But, without fail, if I look down at a screen for more than 30 minutes in a car, I start feeling nauseous and carsick which persists for the rest of the ride.
Now, if you’re better than me, this might sound like a trivial problem only a screen addict might have. So, let’s say we’re on a train instead, surrounded by strangers. Let’s even go a step further and remove the ease of access of near-endless entertainment and dopamine in our pockets and only bring a book for the trip. Even trying to read a book for 30 minutes out of a 4 hour ride would have the same result. It’s incredibly frustrating and taking a nap is probably the easiest solution. But, while this problem isn’t confined to a screen, but it sure can be reduced by one. And that’s what Apple is trying to do in their next major iOS software update with Vehicle Motion Cues.
Before we try to explain how this feature works, it might help to better understand the root cause of motion sickness.
Understanding motion sickness.
Simply put, the symptoms of motion sickness result from the brain being positionally confused. Whether it be contradicting inputs from the eyes or ears or muscles, your brain misinterprets movement for being still or the other way around.
For example, let’s say you’re sitting in a car. While looking at either your own body, hands, perhaps the seat in front of you, or a book beneath your chin, your eyes tell your brain that you’re stationary. However, your body senses motion as the car turns or changes speed when you move with the vehicle. Or take the opposite and let’s say you just got off a ship and though you’re standing straight on firm ground, your body still feels as if it’s moving. These opposing signals confuse the brain and trigger a feeling of uneasiness we call motion sickness.
Each sensory system involved in your perception of location and movement can contribute to motion sickness. Of course, the eyes facilitate the visual component. The inner ears contain the vestibular system which are comprised of three pairs of fluid-filled semicircular tubes and two sacs which respond to changes in the orientation of your head and gravity, respectively. Your muscles also contain nerve endings which signal appropriately for muscular movement or the lack thereof. If any of these signals contradict in the information they send to the brain for a prolonged period of time, you may be vulnerable to developing motion sickness.
How iOS 18 will help.
The most common type of sensory contradiction in a car is visual and vestibular. While your brain is sent signals about the movement of your head and body as the car changes speed or turns, your eyes often are looking at something fixed within the car—like your phone. And often times, your phone screen is fixed too, whether it be to a show or a game, or maybe even an E-book.
Apple’s upcoming Vehicle Motion Cues feature is an accessibility add-on that will try and change our perception of a phone screen being “fixed in place” within the car, and instead make it seem reflective of the changes in motion that our bodies experience as passengers.
As you can see above, the software uses these dots on the sides of your phone screen that will move along the screen as your phone moves within your car. At constant speed with no turns, the dots will not move. But if the car turns left, which moves your body and visual field (if you were to look out the front windshield of the car) to the right, the dots would start to move towards the right along your screen. If your car accelerates, pushing you back into your seat, the dots will correspondingly move back towards you. Thus, your physical motion and visual stimuli match up, even if you are still just looking at your phone.
Of course, this solution isn’t as effective as simply looking out the windows of your car or, if the motion sickness has already kicked in, taking a break outside of the car. However, this new feature seems to be an innovative preventative measure in a time where its unfortunately probably more socially acceptable to sit there on your phone in the backseat rather than talk to the people around you.
Whether this will actually work is yet to be seen and widely tested, but when the update does release, I’ll definitely be there to try it out.
