All hail vehicle Motion Cues on iPhone

Thomas Ricker of The Verge wrote about Apple’s Vehicle Motion Cues feature. He experiences motion sickness while riding in cars, and found the so-called “weird” accessibility to actually deliver on its promise. His wife uses it to great success as well.

“Introduced in 2024, Apple’s Vehicle Motion Cues promise to tap into your device’s accelerometer and gyroscope to reduce or, in my case, even eliminate the motion sickness felt when trying to use an iPhone, iPad, or MacBook inside a moving vehicle,” Ricker wrote on Tuesday. “According to big-S Science, this type of vehicle motion sickness is caused by the eyes staring at a static display while the inner ear feels the car turning, braking, and accelerating. Motion Cues solve this by placing dots around the periphery of the display that move in harmony with the motion of the car. When the car turns right, the dots sweep across the screen to the left; when the car brakes the dots slide forward.”

Ricker used the feature to read books in the Kindle app and write thousand-word reviews, and has enlisted Back Tap on his iPhone to quickly bring up the feature.

There are a couple high-level lessons from Ricker’s story. First, Vehicle Motion Cues strikes me as one of the quintessential “accessibility is for everyone” features. It’s a curb cut. I’m uncomfortable with Ricker characterizing Vehicle Motion Cues as “weird” and “obscure,” but will admit it’s a fairly niche feature. Regardless, Vehicle Motion Cues is one of those accessibility features who can help anyone who feels nauseous while riding in a car and that’s a good thing. I personally find it instructive in to notice how able-bodied people write and talk about accessibility features. Accessibility neither makes headlines nor is regularly covered by publications like The Verge, so Ricker’s piece struck me as reading a bit incredulous, however appreciative, that Vehicle Motion Cues actually works. This is kind of response you get from people (plural) who don’t regularly go spelunking in the Accessibility menu on an iPhone or iPad or Mac. This is why accessibility deserves more than tokenism, coverage-wise.

Secondly, Vehicle Motion Cues also is a quintessential example of Apple’s vaunted vertical integration. Especially on iPhone, Apple can use the accelerometer and gyroscope data and tune it finely to the software powering Vehicle Motion Cues. The company does this because, of course, they build the hardware and software together