Birbla

Join the discussion

Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.

Sign in
  • Hacker News
  • 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.
    by King-Aaron
  • This is an easy enable with "Automatic Detection". Are there any other phone "Accessibility" options that are useful to everyone?
    by neko_ranger
  • On Android I use super dim, as someone who enjoys low light situations, even the darkest brightness setting can be too bright sometimes
    by SturgeonsLaw
  • What do you mean useful to everyone?

    Do you think everyone gets motion sickness?

    by Dylan16807
  • I use the magnifier on iOS to examine small electronics on a PCB, or other small detailed things.

    Similarly, on MacOS I use the Zoom feature (Command Key + mouse scroll) to pixel peep when doing graphical work.

    by bschwindHN
  • Bit of a niche, but I use inverted colors and the camera app to find ticks on my dog. Enabled by triple-clicking the lock button under Settings -> Accessibility -> Accessibility Shortcut -> Classic invert
    by jonasmst
  • Under "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.

    by duskwuff
  • Not 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.

    by Crespyl
  • The question I have is whether a phone with motion cues causes less nausea than no phone at all in a window-less boat.
    by d--b
  • It did for me, but n=1.
    by michelb
  • This feature has helped me so much since i found it. I have kinda bad motion sickness and this has really helped me
    by avycado13
  • 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!
    by myself248
  • Were a lot of people rawdogging their Thinkpads while driving back in the day? Plugged into an inverter into the cigarette lighter to trickle charge? :-)
    by disillusioned
  • 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.

    by esperent
  • This 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.
    by orbital-decay
  • 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

    by wongarsu
  • A related post from last month: 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.

    by zyz
  • 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.
    by ascorbic
  • Motion 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.
    by crossroadsguy
  • I 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.

    by Cider9986
  • Worth 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
    by wongarsu
  • There is a nice little app that does this on Android available on F-droid:

    https://f-droid.org/packages/dev.davidv.motionsickness

    by NateEag
  • I 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.
    by globular-toast
  • I 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-setti...

    by Centigonal
  • 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
    by asimovDev
  • Very cool that apple made it

    I wonder if any other laptops have IMUs that can be used to implement this on Linux/Windows

    by yonatan8070
  • 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!
    by j_bum
  • It 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.

    by fletchowns
  • I 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.
    by sssilver
  • Seems 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.

    by latexr