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I’ve been a motion sickness girlie for as long as I can remember. Family road trips, bus rides, ferries, bumpy flights, taxis, and high-speed trains have all done me dirty. I know all the tricks in the book: sit facing forward, front of the car but back of the boat, eyes on the horizon, and don’t dare read a book or look at your phone.
That last one is easier said than done, though. Like most people who deal with car sickness (which affects nearly 50% of adults!)‚ I’ve had to accept that relying on my phone for entertainment on the road just isn’t an option. But sometimes a little screen time is necessary, like when I need to look up hotel info, navigate for the driver, or curate the perfect playlist. And feeling nauseous from a few minutes of passenger princess phone tasks straight-up sucks. (True story: In many car sickness studies, researchers literally use a “misery scale” rating system.)
So when Apple announced they were including an anti-motion sickness feature in iOS 18 (released on September 16) called Vehicle Motion Cues, I was psyched to try it out. When you focus your eyes on something like a phone or book while in a moving vehicle, it tends to make motion sickness worse. The new feature—achieved via moving dots that slide around the peripherals of your screen—aims to help reduce this nauseating effect when you’re using an iPhone or iPad.
If, like me, you’ve long given up on reading, scrolling TikTok, or even texting people back while in the rear seat of a cab, Vehicle Motion Cues sounds pretty enticing—but also, too good to be true. Here’s what science has to say, plus my personal experience trying it out, for better or worse.
Why does motion sickness happen in the first place?
The short answer: Experts aren’t entirely sure. “There are different theories, and there’s not one that all researchers agree on,” Behrang Keshavarz, PhD, a senior scientist studying human perception, virtual reality, and motion sickness at The KITE Research Institute, tells SELF. “The most prominent theory is called sensory conflict or sensory mismatch.”
The idea is that, under normal circumstances, your body has a good idea of where you’re positioned in space thanks to sensory information coming from sources like your vision, vestibular system (which gauges balance), and proprioceptive system (which handles body awareness). Usually, all this sensory info matches up. But when you’re in a car or other moving vehicle, there’s an unexpected discrepancy between what you see and what you feel—and experts think that’s the root cause of getting motion sick, Dr. Keshavarz says.
This effect is even more pronounced when you focus your eyes on something fixed inside the car, like your phone or a book. “Your vestibular sense and muscles can sense the acceleration, the turning, and all that, but if you’re focusing on a book, your eyes don’t. They’re telling you that you’re stable because they don’t see the movement,” Dr. Keshavarz explains.
Another factor that seems to play an important role in car sickness is the anticipation of motion—the discrepancy between expected and actual movement appears to cause motion sickness in a similar way to the discrepancy between perceived and actual movement. This is why experts often recommend sitting in the front seat of a car and looking straight ahead, so you can see the road and you know what’s coming, Dr. Keshavarz explains. It’s also one potential reason why looking down at your phone can make you feel so miserable—something Apple hopes to counteract with their new iOS feature.
How does Apple’s new motion sickness feature work, exactly?
Vehicle Motion Cues is designed to help combat the sensory mismatch that can trigger motion sickness using little animated black dots that hover on the sides of your screen. Via sensors already built into your iPhone or iPad, the device recognizes that you’re in a moving vehicle, and when it turns, accelerates, or brakes, the dots move in the opposite direction to signal the change in movement. (For example, when the car accelerates, the dots move toward the bottom of your screen, in the same direction you’d see markings on the road move if you were looking out the front window.) You can turn this feature on and off in your device’s settings, or set it to automatic so that it activates when it recognizes that you’re in a moving vehicle.
But can it actually help you feel less pukey?
I’ve got bummer news: The first few times I tried out Vehicle Motion Cues, it didn’t go so well. After about 10 minutes in the back of a taxi, spent entirely looking at my phone, I felt substantially nauseous. It’s hard to say if I was less vommy compared to how I’d feel if the feature wasn’t on, but it certainly didn’t prevent motion sickness in my case. (FWIW, some Reddit users who’d been testing the Beta version reported better luck, though the results were mixed.)
That’s to be expected. “Our research and that of many others has shown that there are large individual differences when it comes to motion sickness, as well as large individual differences in the effectiveness of sickness countermeasures,” Michael Barnett-Cowan, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Kinesiology and Health Sciences and director of the Multisensory Brain and Cognition Lab at the University of Waterloo, tells SELF. “What this means is that Apple’s application might work for some people, not work for other people, and for some people it could even make symptoms worse.”
Vehicle Motion Cues does have potential, though. Again, visual cues that show how you’re moving may be able to minimize the sensory conflict that happens when you look at your device in the car, Dr. Keshavarz says. Plus, Apple’s new feature isn’t coming out of the blue—it reflects what motion sickness researchers are up to on a larger scale.
For example, in 2019, computer scientists at the University of Salzburg in Austria developed and tested an Android app they called Bubble Margin, which operates similarly to Apple’s version. Though their study was small, with just 10 participants, they found that motion sickness levels were significantly lower for people who used the app while reading than those who didn’t. “In theory, I think [Vehicle Motion Cues] could be a good solution for some people,” Dr. Keshavarz says. “The question is, how well is it done?”
When I tried the feature, I occasionally had trouble getting it to activate and respond to the movement of the car or train I was on—and this little bit of lag can backfire. “The last thing you want is to add another confusing sensory input that’s not accurate,” Dr. Keshavarz says. “Presenting visual cues that aren’t perfectly matching the motion could technically make symptoms worse.” (One recent study, for example, found that dynamic or moving images induced motion sickness faster and to a greater extent than non-moving visual input.)
The experts I spoke with also note that people can habituate to motion sickness; it’s sorta like getting your sea legs. “The more exposure you have, the better you cope,” Dr. Barnett-Cowan explains. Our brains haven’t evolved to deal with the weird sensory mix that happens when you read or look at a phone in the back of a car, but they are very adaptable. So after doing it over and over again, your brain can anticipate what it feels like, which might make you less likely to get sick. “For some people, that change can happen very quickly,” Dr. Barnett Cowan says. “And for those people, this new application might actually help by giving them the right visual information to aid in that adaptation.” However, for others, it may take longer to habituate, or the app might just not work, he adds.
I, for one, am hoping that my experience with the feature will get better. Perhaps it’s just a matter of some minor updates to iOS 18 and my getting used to it. And if not? It’ll remain yet another very good reason to stop looking at my phone for literally any amount of time.
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