Apple's Vehicle Motion Cues stopped my car sickness, letting me read and write in the passenger seat without the nausea that usually comes on twisty roads.
Vehicle Motion Cues, introduced in 2024, use a device's accelerometer and gyroscope to place peripheral dots that move opposite the vehicle's motion to reduce the sensory mismatch between your eyes and inner ear, and they run on iPhone, iPad and Mac.
The Verge's Thomas Ricker tested the feature on mountain switchbacks and says he comfortably read in the Kindle app for hours and even wrote a 1,000-word review while his wife drove their camper van.
The setting lives in Accessibility on iOS, iPadOS and macOS, can be set to appear automatically when vehicle motion is detected, and you can adjust dot size, color and density or turn it off.
For quick control, Ricker mapped a double tap on the back of his iPhone to toggle Vehicle Motion Cues using Accessibility → Touch → Back Tap on devices running iOS 18 and later.
He notes the black dots can interfere with maps, text and images on long straight stretches where the dots remain motionless, and says the defaults worked well during a two-month road trip around Europe.
