Credit where credit is due.Applehas a long and dedicated history of rolling out accessibility features, making its platforms the most approachable of any tech company. It’s easy to get lost in the wave of new hardware and software, only to forget that most of these devices never consider being accessible to people with disabilities.
Interestingly, many of Apple’s accessibility features are used by regular people. I’m a big fan of the Increase Contrast setting, for example. A new accessibility setting coming toiOS 18that’s likely to be of huge appeal to the masses is Vehicle Motion Cues, a software feature designed to help people avoid motion while in thecar.
What is Vehicle Motion Cues?
Your solution to motion sickness
It’s estimated that90% of peopleexperience motion sickness at least once in their lifetime. So, Apple rolling out a feature like this makes complete sense. When enabled oniOS, Vehicle Motion Cues are tiny dots that appear on your display that shift in the direction the car’s moving. So, when moving forward, the dots also move forward. When the vehicle is turning, the dots move in that direction.
Motion sickness is caused by your eyes fixating on a single point while your body feels, and your internal ears sense, motion. These conflicting senses create motion sickness. The idea behind Vehicle Motion Cues is to give your eyes motion to align with what your body’s feeling, thus countering the onset of motion sickness.
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How did Vehicle Motion Cues impact me?
A few dots can make a big difference
It’s impressive what a few dots on your iPhone display can do. Usually, my stomach is pretty good when it comes to motion sickness. Although, as I’ve gotten older, it’s not as strong as it used to be. I’m also fortunate that I’m usually the driver in my household, so I’m generally not the one using my phone while in motion. Still, I’ve had a few opportunities recently to try Vehicle Motion Cues as a passenger. I can say it’s an excellent feature forAppleto add.
The fact that it’s enabled by default will probably confuse people at first, but with accessibility features often being hidden withinSettings, I think that’s a good trade-off to make. Motion sickness isn’t overly limiting to a healthy, successful life for most. Still, as a feature of convenience, I’m glad Apple spent the time to research and implement it.
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How to turn on Vehicle Motion Cues
Off to Settings, we go
Upon updating to iOS 18, Vehicle Motion Cues is enabled automatically, meaning those small dots will appear on your iPhone’s display when it detects motion in a vehicle. If you’d like, you can also set the feature to be on all the time, although I’m not sure why, or off. You can do this by launchingSettings> scrolling down and tappingAccessibility>Motion>Show Vehicle Motion Cues> selectingOn,Automatic, orOff.
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