One 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.
This 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.
this helped me tremendously when I had to work in the backseat of a moving car. Felt sick pretty quick when I started using the laptop until I remembered about this feature because someone on HN recently posted / commented about it
Thank you so much for sharing this. I’ve been saying to my wife for about a year now that I wish MacBooks had the motion cues feature… turns out I just needed to search for it!
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.
My 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.
Honor 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
This 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!
I'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.
I think two accelerometers would do it at different ends of the phone. Normal hand-based motion will rarely include a sustained exact acceleration in one direction on both of these at the same time e.
There 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.
Can 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.
These 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.
Wonder 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).
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 17.3 ms ] threadI 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.
https://f-droid.org/packages/dev.davidv.motionsickness
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-setti...
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.
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.
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
Sharing this here in case anyone wants to check out the discussion there and see how it looks in the Verge's short review.
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.
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.
iPhone 12 Pro (26.5.2)
I guess they're moving in the opposite direction of the turn to force the perception of turning.
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.