Apple’s amazing anti-nausea drops cured my car sickness

I’ll just work on the carI thought. But after a few minutes of staring at my screen at the rapid changes in the mountains I started to feel cold symptoms, nausea rising in my gut. I looked ahead for relief, but nothing helped… until I remembered Apple’s magic dots.

Released in 2024, Apple’s Traffic Signs promise to enter your device’s accelerometer and gyroscope to slow down or, me too, even to solve Motion sickness is felt when trying to use an iPhone, iPad, or MacBook in a moving vehicle.

According to big-S Science, this type of motion sickness is caused by the eyes focusing on a static image while the inner ear hears the car turning, bumping, and speeding. Motion Cues solves this problem by placing dots around the edges of the screen that move in sync with the movement of the car. When the car turns right, the dots go to the left of the window; When a car breaks down, the dots go forward.

It sounds like crap, but I’m here to tell you that it works. With it turned on, I’ve comfortably read books in the Kindle app on my phone for several hours, writing 1,000-word reviews while my wife drives our car from place to place. They also use Apple’s Vehicle Motion Cues now, because they’ve been changing the game for how we interact with work and life on the road.

Vehicle Motion Cues can be set up under the settings available in iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. It can be turned on, off, or set to appear automatically when it is detected as running. I like to change the dots so I can’t see them when I drive. Black dots are less noticeable, but they can distort maps, text, and images on long straight lines that make the dots appear static (Apple should reduce all the dots in that area). You can also adjust the droplet size, color, and density if you want, but I’ve found that the defaults work best.

I made it easy to toggle Motion Cues on and off by double-tapping the back of my iPhone. To do the same, go to Accessibility -> Touch -> Tap Back and enable the Double Tap feature to Vehicle Motion Cues on devices that support iOS 18 and above.

I’m lucky that I remembered this simple look that I used almost every day during a recent two-month trip around Europe. We hope you have a great time traveling this summer.