It’s still a few weeks until WWDC, but Apple has already pre-announced some of the innovative features coming to iOS 18, visionOS 2, and its other platforms via an accessibility news drop. Later this year we’ll be getting Vision Pro-style eye tracking on iPad and iPhone, powerful Vocal Shortcuts to create custom device voice commands, Live Captions for augmented reality on visionOS, and a hands-free CarPlay mode.
One other iOS 18 feature announced, which is sure to be beneficial to an especially broad array of users, is called Vehicle Motion Cues. This feature aims to reduce or eliminate motion sickness for iPhone users riding in the car.
An innovative approach to a common problem
Here’s how Vehicle Motion Cues will work, per Apple:
Vehicle Motion Cues is a new experience for iPhone and iPad that can help reduce motion sickness for passengers in moving vehicles. Research shows that motion sickness is commonly caused by a sensory conflict between what a person sees and what they feel, which can prevent some users from comfortably using iPhone or iPad while riding in a moving vehicle. With Vehicle Motion Cues, animated dots on the edges of the screen represent changes in vehicle motion to help reduce sensory conflict without interfering with the main content. Using sensors built into iPhone and iPad, Vehicle Motion Cues recognizes when a user is in a moving vehicle and responds accordingly. The feature can be set to show automatically on iPhone, or can be turned on and off in Control Center.
Apple shared a sneak peek of what exactly the interface will look like on an iPhone running iOS 18.
The addition of animated dots to eliminate the disconnect between external motion and motion on your display seems too simple to work. Surely someone would have thought of this fix before, right?
But presumably, in Apple’s testing, it does work. So the company’s planning to roll it out broadly with iOS and iPadOS 18 this fall.
9to5Mac’s Take
Vehicle Motion Cues, alongside the other innovative new technology Apple has announced, makes for a powerful showcase of the company’s accessibility work. These iOS 18 additions may not receive the same level of attention as whatever AI goodies WWDC will bring, but their importance should not be downplayed in the slightest.
Apple is solving major problems for people who experience motion sickness, or who have mobility limitations, or the hard of hearing or deaf, and on the list goes. These features show how tech can truly change lives for the better.
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