Apple's weird anti-nausea dots cured my car sickness

I get the same type of nausea described by the author. I can’t read a book or look at a screen for too long without a feeling awful. I can also get it just from sitting in a rear passenger seat, especially if vehicle has poor visibility, and even worse with a bad driver. I have to really focus on looking outside the vehicle at the moving world.

Interestingly, I think there are people that have the opposite type of motion sickness. For example, my mom could never play arcade racing games without getting nauseous. The issue being focusing on a screen with rapidly moving objects and everything else in the peripheral being fixed, versus focusing on a fixed object and everything in the peripheral moving. She never had any issue reading a book in a moving car

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.panshen.mo...

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.urbandroid...

And even one that claims to work with sound:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.samsung.a1...

EDIT: Actually there's an enormous number of apps like this, many released very recently with similar style etc. Weird.

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(); }

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Posting here because I went the majority of my life without knowing that such a treatment existed.

About a year ago I flew to the University of North Dakota and spent an hour a day over 3 days sitting in a simulator that would spin faster and faster while the facilitator talked to me over the headset and kept me distracted.

Was nowhere near as bad as I'd feared, honestly maybe a 3/10 on the discomfort/nausea scale.

Ever since then, motion sickness completely gone. I used to despise boats, calling them mankind's cruelest invention. Taken many flights, reading car trips, hot humid boat rides in rough seas in southeast asia since and... nothing.

Would 100% recommend. I think you can find the program at the bottom of this page, it's $400:

https://www.aerospacephysiology.com/

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.

1: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/motion-sickness-g...

You can give yourself serious motion sickness in VR if you grab hold of the VR camera and force a roll / pitch in this state.

One of the things some games do is during motion create "tunnel vision" when you move, shrinking down the size of the video feed and putting a black border around it. This significantly reduces this unpleasant effect. I assume the high resolution portion of your eyeball isn't used for motion inference, which makes sense.

I'm thinking this feature is exploiting this same peripheral vision cue.

I also recently picked up an EmeTerm wristband - it's basically a mini TENS machine for you wrist. I was super skeptical, but my sister recommended it so I tried it and it absolutely helps with (though doesn't always total eliminate) nausea I get from motion sickness. I'm not entirely sure how it works, but it seems like it may have an accelerometer and use that to decide when (and at what strength/duration?) to send a mild shock.

One simple question detects motion sickness susceptibility in migraine patients: While riding in a car or bus, can you read without getting motion sick?

Can this same idea be extrapolated to a device that emits concentrated beams onto the surface of a book?

I'm thinking of those clip-on lights for books that allow one to read in the dark, but for this purpose explicitly. My daughter also gets car sick reading paper books while in a moving vehicle.

I get car sick easily but on open water I have to sit and watch the horizon or it's adios cookies.

So it makes sense with that model that you'd get motion sickness reading in the car. Your eyes are so focused on the fixed page you're not getting the movement cues you would if you looked out the window. The dots give you that cue somewhat subliminally.

I have a theory it could be slightly nauseating for one to try and read when not in motion while dots moved around the page like that.

I get super car sick, like projectile vomit straight out of a horror movie sick, after an hour of staring at a screen in the car.

Awesome share!

Does it also help people who get carsick without looking at a screen?

I get carsick in pretty much any modern car, unless I'm the one driving.

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?

So the author is telling us they're having more work- and screen-time while on the road. Great, that sounds like exactly what we need...

It should be a frontline feature to toggle on or off from the command center. It’s there once it’s enabled, but should be there by default.

There's probably a meeting going on somewhere inside google/apple right now to work out how to cure humans of the need for sleep.