WWDC is still a few weeks away, but Apple has already announced some innovative features that will appear in iOS 18, VisionOS 2 and others its platforms through its accessibility news release. Later this year we'll get Vision Pro-style eye tracking on iPad and iPhone, powerful voice commands for creating your own device voice commands, live captions for augmented reality in VisionOS, and a hands-free CarPlay mode.
One more The announced feature of iOS 18, which is sure to be useful to a particularly wide range of users, is called Vehicle Motion Cues. The purpose of this feature is to reduce or eliminate motion sickness for iPhone users while driving.
An innovative approach to a common problem
Here's how a car motion signal would work, according to Apple:
Vehicle Motion Cues is a new interface for iPhone and iPad that can help reduce motion sickness in moving vehicles. Research shows that motion sickness is usually caused by a sensory conflict between what a person sees and what they feel, which may prevent some users from comfortably using an iPhone or iPad while riding in a moving vehicle. With vehicle motion cues, animated dots along the edges of the screen indicate changes in vehicle motion, helping to reduce sensory conflict without interfering with the main content. Using sensors built into iPhones and iPads, Vehicle Motion Cues recognizes when the user is in a moving vehicle and reacts accordingly. This feature can be set to appear automatically on iPhone, or you can turn it on and off in Control Center.
Apple has shared a sneak peek of exactly what the interface will look like on a running iPhone iOS 18.
Addendum Using animated dots to bridge the gap between external motion and the motion on your display seems too simple to work with. Surely someone has thought of this fix before, right?
But apparently, based on Apple's testing, it actually works. Therefore, the company plans to widely implement it in iOS and iPadOS 18 this fall.
9to5Mac Opinion
Vehicle Motion Cues, along with other innovative technologies announced by Apple, serves as a powerful demonstration of the company's work in the area of accessibility. These iOS 18 additions may not get the same attention as any AI goodies WWDC will bring, but their importance shouldn't be downplayed in the slightest.
Apple is solving big problems for people suffering seasickness. or who have mobility restrictions, or are hard of hearing, or deaf, and so on down the list. These features show how technology can truly change lives for the better.
