HI version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.
Advertisement
Advertisement
⚡ Community Insights
Discussion Sentiment
60% Positive
Analyzed from 3544 words in the discussion.
Trending Topics
#car#motion#sickness#don#dots#sick#while#more#looking#reading
Discussion (121 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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
I just don’t use the phone when a passenger in a car.
If it works for you and doesn’t bother you as much as me, go for it! I wouldn’t be surprised that it works.
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.
I can't vouch for it (yet) but am going to give it a try!
https://www.androidauthority.com/google-motion-cues-pixels-n...
I've tried some of those Android equivalents and they seemed to work on any motion, not on acceleration like the Apple one.
(The reason the permission is so dangerous is they can trick you into pressing the wrong button by relabeling dangerous text with innocuous text.)
Or, it would be wild, if it weren't fairly obvious that this is just Google protecting their mobile ad revenue.
Well, that depends on the other apps you have installed. Unless things have changed in newer versions, apps with no networking can still do IPC, so any app can for example use Cronet to make network requests via Google Play Services, regardless of the toggle, as long as sandboxed Google Play Services has network permission.
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:
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.
As a kid, I was told to turn 90° so that the back and forth of my eyes reading were in line with the motion of the car. This was soooo before any kind of electronic devices. Hell, the radio in the car still had the giant push buttons for saving stations.
the theory being, at constant velocity in a straight line, your body feels at rest, so you want to look somewhere that reinforces that. looking out the side window has scenery rushing past, which is the opposite.
turning sideways and reading sounds like a nightmare.
(I have also been on bumpy flights, no issues whatsoever, even when reading a book at the same time.)
FIX THE CODE!
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
But I used to get sick playing Quake, so maybe I'm in the 11 group.
I see trivial variants of your comment on almost every long-form article or comment posted to HN. They're so repetitive that it raises doubt whether they're written by humans.
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.
Isn't it a better "cure" to look out the window rather than stare at a screen?
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.
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.
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
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.
1: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/motion-sickness-g...
Do you find it is more/less effective on different kinds of devices?
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.
These dots help tremendously. On airplanes and commuter trains and such, i just pop open phone and stare at screen, sometimes a blank note even. It has helped me clearly see: My brain does not perceive acceleration correctly. When it can visualize the motion with the dots, somehow that helps cue it in as to what is really happening. I am very often surprised at the direction of acceleration, ie when the plane is turning, if im not looking out the window, i think i would be unable to tell you if the plane is turning or not; but the dots are flying sideways off the screen - ah.
My favorite discovery which really cemented this, and a good correlary to how even looking out the window is not enough: When the commuter train stops, and is no longer moving, the dots on the screen will remain moving (forward, ie im reverse) a few moments. Or when the plane is taking off and shifts from straight to up, the dots often stop moving, or change direction.
This change in acceleration you feel, which is not merely "which direction are we going", is the part brains like mine arent picking up right. These dots help a ton. I wish i could embed them into glasses - one day!
For me it's really just modern cars. Older cars which are more spacious and have better outside visibility, as well as being better at transferring the sensation of movement and acceleration don't affect me in the same way. Trains and planes are also fine.
I'll try this out, hopefully it will make taxi rides a lot less dreadful!
The method I've settled into for consistent results is:
1. Eat a full meal & hydrate 30+ minutes before traveling. Sometimes this involves overeating in a day, but the alternative is worse for me. 2. Take 6.25-12.5mg of meclizine 30-45 minutes before traveling (quarter, third, or half of a standard meclizine tablet depending on road conditions -- windy, hilly, and/or frequent stop-and-go traffic for long periods of time = half, while a mostly straight road with smooth acceleration = quarter). 3. Eat small amounts (periodic snacking) while traveling; more sugary foods like dried mango seems to work best. 4. Include ginger in any form with the snacking (sometimes I'll simply cut a chunk of raw ginger and take small bites out of it).
I don't even bother trying to read or use electronics while in a car or while on a flight during any taxiing or ascent/descent. Some buses or trains are circumstantially fine. Definitely will be trying some of the Android versions of this.
Ginger does help although not as much as I'd like. Eating in general does as well but even less than ginger.
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...
I get car sick easily but on open water I have to sit and watch the horizon or it's adios cookies.
I don’t think it’s actually driving specific, I think it just is based on the accelerometer. So it might work.
(am highly succeptible to motion sickness, i generally have the feature on at all times).
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?
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.
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.
As for this feature, I found out about it and turned it on, but I don't think it helped me much with reading off the screen while in a car.
It's interesting how many kinds of motion sickness there are. I have no problem reading in trains, or sitting in a car and looking ahead or through the window. But I can't read in a car, even with these dots.
This article is actually the first time I've heard of this feature and I follow Apple news a lot, so I appreciate it.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/ethics-statement
Had a read through it, stumbled over this one:
> We do not give subjects of our reporting the ability to preview or approve interview questions, nor do we allow them to review our stories before we publish.
In Germany, that would be considered strange - here it is established good practice in print/written interviews to hand over the final story to the interview partner(s) [1], especially when the interview consists of a lot of industry-specific jargon to make sure that there's some sort of quality control.
[1] https://journalistikon.de/autorisierung/
Why do you want something useful like this to be with a company? Isnt it better if everyone in the world benefitted from this?