I’ll just work from the car, I thought. But after a few minutes of staring at my screen on quick mountain switchbacks I could feel the first signs of cold, coagulated nausea bubbling up from that sweaty place in my gut. I looked to the horizon for relief, but nothing helped… until I remembered Apple’s magic dots.
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.
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.
It sounds preposterous, but I’m here to tell you that it actually works. Once enabled, I’ve comfortably read books in the Kindle app on my phone for a few hours at a go, and even written 1,000-word reviews while my wife drove our camper van to the next destination. She uses Apple’s Vehicle Motion Cues now, too, because they’ve been a game changer for how we balance work with life on the road.
Vehicle Motion Cues can be configured under accessibility settings in iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. They can be turned on, off, or set to appear automatically when vehicle motion is detected. I prefer to toggle the dots to avoid seeing them when I’m driving the car. The black dots are fairly unobtrusive, but they can interfere with maps, text, and imagery on long straight stretches of road that cause the dots to sit motionless (Apple should dim all the dots in those situations). You can also configure the dot size, color, and density if you want, but I found the defaults to work just fine.
I made it easy to quickly toggle the Motion Cues on and off by double tapping the back of my iPhone. To do the same, head over to Accessibility –> Touch –> Back Tap and set the Double Tap gesture to Vehicle Motion Cues on devices supporting iOS 18 and above.
I’m fortunate that I remembered this obscure accessibility feature that I used almost daily on a recent two-month road trip around Europe. Hopefully you’ll find similar success when traveling this summer.