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How I combat motion sickness with my iPhone – and you can too
I’ve always had a mixed experience with motion sickness. I don’t suffer from it on a plane or ship, thankfully. But put me in the back seat of a car, and I often get hit by a bad case of it, especially if the ride is twisty and turny.
Triggered by mixed signals across your eyes, inner ear, and brain, those feelings of dizziness and queasiness can be extremely uncomfortable. For anyone else who experiences motion sickness, you can turn to your iPhone for help.
Introduced with iOS 18 is a helpful option called Vehicle Motion Cues. With this feature turned on, animated dots appear on the edges of the screen to help you better process changes in the movement of the car. Your goal is simply to use and navigate your phone normally.
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With its built-in accelerometer, your iPhone will sense that you’re traveling in a moving vehicle. When the car turns, the dots move in the opposite direction of the turn.
“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,” Apple said when it unveiled the feature in 2024.
“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.”
How to use Vehicle Motion Cues on the iPhone
Here’s how I combat my motion sickness with my iPhone and how you can do the same. You can also use Vehicle Motion Cues on an iPad with iPadOS 18 or higher.
First, make sure you’re running iOS 18 or iPadOS 18 or higher. Head to Settings, select General, and then tap Software Update. Allow the latest version to download and install.
To activate the motion cue feature, go to Settings, select Accessibility, and then tap Motion. Select the option for “Show Vehicle Motion Cues.” Here you can turn it On, in which case the dots immediately appear and stay on the screen until you turn them off.
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Otherwise, you can set it to Automatic, in which case the dots pop up on the screen only if your phone detects a vehicle in motion. I typically turn it on rather than set it to Automatic so the dots are visible from the get-go.
You can also add Vehicle Motion Cues to Control Center, where you can access it more quickly. Swipe down from the top right of your iPhone to open Control Center. Tap the plus icon in the upper left, then select “Add a Control.”
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At the Control screen, swipe down to Vision Accessibility and tap the icon for Vehicle Motion Cues to add it. To activate the feature, just tap its Control Center icon and set it to On or Automatic.
After you activate Vehicle Motion Cues, you’ll see eight dots — four on the left edge and four on the right edge. Overlaid on the screen, the dots will collectively move up, down, left, or right depending on the motion of the car. To quell your motion sickness, don’t focus your eyes on any one dot or series of dots. Instead, continue using your phone as you normally would.
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The movement of the dots should help your eyes and your brain better adjust to the movement of the vehicle. As you navigate around your phone, the dots will even change color based on the background so that you can see them more easily.
To test Vehicle Motion Cues, I tried it on a few different car trips, purposely sitting in the back seat and anxiously waiting for the sensation to hit me. My initial experiences were mixed. Sometimes I felt a bit of relief; other times not so much. On later trips, the feature seemed to work more effectively and consistently. I’m not sure if that’s because I got used to it or because Apple has refined it over time.
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Either way, I now rely on it when I’m in the car and begin to feel that onset of queasiness. Your results may vary. But if you experience motion sickness the way I do, this is one feature that’s certainly worth a try.
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