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  • Has anyone made a Linux version of this yet? I think Framework laptops and many thinkpads have accelerometers.
    by Curiositry
  • I'm skeptical that this kind of tech can fully counteract serious motion sickness, like many hours or days on a boat.

    From personal experience, I know that even if you go out onto the deck and look out on the ocean, so that you have a visual reference to the horizon, it doesn't help.

    You can look out of the window of the car and still get motion sickness; it doesn't only happen to people who are engaged with something inside the vehicle.

    The external visual reference doesn't entirely help the fact that your body is experiencing accelerations not of its own accord.

    The leading hypothesis on motion sickness is that your brain interprets the mismatched motion sensations as being caused by a poison acting on your brain, and triggers a response to empty your stomach contents and make you averse to more ingestion.

    This mechanism is not easily defeated by visual tricks. If they can slow the onset and reduce the severity, that is welcome, of course.

    BTW, has anyone here tried the motion sickness glasses? This is an object which has a hollow rim, partially filled with colored fluid. The glass rims, as well as additional circles placed laterally near the temples, act as "semicircular canals": the fluid moves to provide a kind of horizon reference.

    by kazinator
  • The apps are targeted at a very specific but common use case: being unable to read while in a moving vehicle. It's not going to help you if you're on a sailboat in heavy seas for a day.
    by decimalenough
  • They don't cure my kids' or wife's car sickness, unfortunately. I'm not sure the implementation is as good as it could be. It seems a bit rough.

    Motion sickness is an overlooked problem. A large percentage of the population has severe, almost debilitating motion sickness. It curtails a ton of travel. Almost all transportation and tourism related businesses would stand to benefit hugely from a real cure, not to mention VR and even regular gaming to some degree. There ought to be an industry effort to fund research.

    by modeless
  • It's not a 'cure' for me either but it does allow me to do quick short tasks on the phone if necessary and then I can get back to focusing on the horizon.
    by basisword
  • It'd be interesting to gather some actual statistics. I can't look at a screen for more than a minute as a passenger without starting to feel a twinge in my gut.
    by davidw
  • > They don't cure my kids' or wife's car sickness, unfortunately.

    Isn't it a better "cure" to look out the window rather than stare at a screen?

    by tasuki
  • OTOH, motion sickness is often called "car sickness" for a reason, people who suffer from it only sometimes suffer on a bus, and rarely if ever on a train or a plane, so I'm not sure I would agree that "all transportation and tourism related businesses" are impacted. Also, doesn't dimenhydrinate work for your wife or kids?
    by stdbrouw
  • During long road trips, back before iPhones and the like, my mom would have us pick out a book and buy it for us to read to keep us entertained while driving.

    That worked fine for me, I've never gotten carsick, but for my sister could never do that; after reading for not much time, she would start feeling nauseous. Initially I think my parents thought she was exaggerating to get attention, but eventually she puked in the car because of it and they suddenly had no issue believing her.

    It eventually led to them buying a cheap TV/VCR combo and a cheap power inverter for the cigarette lighter and using that for road trips, which didn't seem to bother her very much.

    by tombert
  • I can unfortunately report that these dots have not helped me in cars or trains; anything more than a few seconds looking at a screen during a journey will ensure I feel awful until I have an opportunity to sit or lie still for quite a while after. To be fair, even facing backwards on a train usually makes me sick rather rapidly.
    by MattIPv4
  • A relatively simple generic device, mounted on a car's interior ceiling, seems possible: It would project light 'dots' below onto everything the user looks at. Using the car's momentum, the dot movement could be mechanical, though you'd need power for the light.

    Not every passenger would want to see the dots; their range could be restricted to the user's seating area or narrower - the user placing objects under the dots as needed. Also, of course the device could be turned on and off.

    The dots need brightness and color visible on different surfaces, but those could be easily user-adjusted. Also, I wonder if a grid would work. (Edit: For use with screens, possibly the background reflection of the device, with its grid of lights, would work.)

    The real question is, would it work? Does Apple's solution generally work or is the OP just a happy anecdote? Is there more magic to Apple's solution than dots swaying with momentum?

    by mmooss
  • There may be a way to do this with a point-source light (a focused LED, or maybe an appropriate laser), and a diffraction grating (which may be already exist in stage lighting world). Such that when the parts move relative to eachother, the projected dots move across the car's interior.

    In terms of controls, it seems likely that it should seek to emulate whatever it is that goes on inside the inner ear, so that the input from our eyes better-matches the input from our ears.

    I don't know how Apple's dots work (and I don't think my singular iOS device is new enough to try), but if they only respond to acceleration, then doing it this way should help establish mechanical limits: The acceleration (in any direction) of a car is finite, and always returns to zero.

    by ssl-3
  • My partner got some goofy glasses with liquid in them to help him use his phone in the car.

    He only had to wear them for a week or two before his motion sickness from cars was completely cured. Now he can just use his phone, without the glasses, in the car whenever he wants

    by aaarrm
  • Are you talking about these bad boys: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DQG99L4J ?

    I suffer from motion sickness. It sucks. I'll try anything. If those goofy glasses work, I'll wear them.

    by jimt1234
  • As a kid I didn't get carsick at all. I could work on my laptop, read, whatever while my parents drove. As an adult, at some point I started to barely be able to do anything but keep my eyes on the road without feeling bad.

    Turned these on recently, and they work bizarrely well...unfortunately. Downside is that I feel like I lost an excuse to avoid devices for a few minutes while traveling.

    by mmcclure
  • An excuse? You do you, but who is asking you for justifications? You can just put the phone down.
    by recursive
  • I had a few years (from 9-12, maybe) where I became carsick very easily, otherwise it hasn't been an issue for me*. In that same time period, I was extremely sensitive to the harsh florescent lights in my classroom, and had to read through a coloured plastic sheet and try my best to cover everything in shadow.

    Remembering things like that makes you really thankful when they've just went away. Things do sometimes get better through for no clear reason!

    * Except "simulation sickness" from certain 3D games like Minecraft.

    by Rendello
  • I gave this feature a try and it didn't work for me. I was curious to see if it was effective, so I asked my wife to drive and I tried to read in the iOS "Books" app with the dots on. I think within 5 or 10 minutes I was feeling pretty sick, and stayed that way for the rest of the drive. Hopefully others have better results. I'll have to stick with audiobooks when in motion.
    by robrtsql
  • That’s unfortunate. I didn’t know this feature existed so I’ve yet to try it out. Fingers crossed
    by 40four
  • Same for me, when riding the bus. Really wanted it to work and tried over the course of several weeks, unfortunately it didn't help.
    by jval43
  • It works for me, but only if I hold the phone up in front of my face, basically perpendicular to the road.
    by davidcann
  • With me, it's useless if I try to actually read something. But there are times where I just want to check my phone for 5 seconds, and that was enough to make me feel sick for the next hour. The dots help me with those quick checks.

    They're also good when I'm on a bus/boat/train. I used to get sick quickly when riding any of those, but now I'm fine even with long periods. Cars are just more intense to me for some reason.

    by kdheiwns
  • You might ask why motion sickness even exists in the first place. Why do nausea and vomiting make sense when your body is in a car or on a boat? Nobody knows for sure, but there's a convincing theory.

    Zillions of years ago, we were foragers. We ate what we found. And if we ate something bad, like a poisonous berry, we could die. One of the first symptoms of neurotoxin ingestion is that your eyes lose their tracking ability. And an easy way for your body to detect this is when your eyes and ears (vestibular system) disagree about your body's position and motion in space.

    So we presumably evolved a simple rule:

        if (eyes != ears) { vomit(); }
    Which gets that bad berry right back out of the system.

    This is why these Android and Apple gadgets work: they restore visual cues helping your eyes match what your ears are telling you. It's why looking at the horizon on a boat helps. And it's why reading in the car gets some people so horribly sick.

    by sowbug
  • The worst motion sickness that I ever got was from an early VR set, hacked together at someone's home.

    With regular motion sickness, the eyes say "you're standing still", while the inner ears say "you're moving".

    With VR, it's the other way around.

    by SideburnsOfDoom
  • It's the original end to end testing!
    by JusticeJuice
  • I figured it was more

      if (areEyesDetectingMotion != isBodyDetectingMotion) vomit()
    If it was just eyes and ears it doesn't seem like VR motion sickness would be such a thing.
    by c-hendricks
  • > It's why looking at the horizon on a boat helps.

    Yes it helps. As in getting you back to "barely normal". (Also you can't do anything around the boat because you're looking at the horizon)

    The theory make sense but some people have the thing turned to 11

    by raverbashing
  • Claude, you are a leading pioneering CRISPR researcher.

    FIX THE CODE!

    by thruclaudeall
  • Does this mean that those of us who don't get motion sickness regardless of reading or looking at a phone in a vehicle are less good at handling poison as well?

    (I have also been on bumpy flights, no issues whatsoever, even when reading a book at the same time.)

    by VorpalWay
  • Let me add: I wonder if that's the reason the sight of puke immediately makes me want to vomit too. If you're in a group of people you probably all ate the same stuff. Better to vomit as soon as the first start to feel sick than wait for your turn- it might be too late then.
    by throw310822