Vehicle Motion Cues

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.

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.

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...

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.

There is a nice little app that does this on Android available on F-droid:

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

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.

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.

I think this is a good example of how Apple is doing well in the application of AI and also uncharacteristically doing poorly in the application of AI.

Doing well as it quietly is coming up with helpful product updates like this which are buried in support docs and limited splash.

I kind of prefer this more quiet usage of application of AI.

Great submission summary! This feature came out years ago, why the eyes on this today? And with zero context?

I wish this worked a little better. It doesn't solve motion sickness for me when looking at my phone in a car, but it does seem to make it a little less severe.

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.

Is this related to roll and pitch motion in sea sickness where by knowing the horizon and direction of travel can help?

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.

I like the "bubbling" dots effect that occurs in an airplane when making a turn. Anyone know the reason?

I guess they're moving in the opposite direction of the turn to force the perception of turning.

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!