Dancing dots: The motion-sickness cure hidden in iPhone settings

A hidden iPhone setting is turning heads and saving stomachs. But does relief just mean more time staring at your screen?

I try not to look at other people's phones, but you get unintentional glances jammed in the crowds on the New York subway, bodies lurching around as the train blasts through tunnels. Lately I've noticed something strange. I keep seeing people with dots dancing across their screens.

The more I saw it, the more I needed to know. It turns out all these people have something in common: they get motion sickness.

This choreographed dot ballet is a lesser-known iPhone setting called "Vehicle Motion Cues" that's supposed to help. It puts animated dots on the edges of your screen, which move in sync with the motion of the vehicle you're in, thanks to the phone's accelerometer.

Reviews are mixed, but over the past few months, some people have gone wild for it. One man I met on the subway told me he loves the feature so much he keeps it on 24 hours a day, even when he's not moving – though he declined to share his name with the strange journalist asking questions on his commute.

The dots could be an antidote if you're cursed with a history of queasy car rides. I was born with an iron stomach, so I'm afraid I can't relate. But I think there's something more interesting happening. Bit by bit, our devices are adapting to infiltrate more of our lives.

A phone for what ails you

Here's some trivia I learned talking to doctors for this story: it seems like most of the people who study motion sickness get motion sickness.

"When I go on a cruise, I'm in my bunk for like 72 to 96 hours. I can't eat, I can't get up," says Tom Stoffregen, professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota, US, who's been studying motion sickness since the 1980s.

Experts disagree about what causes motion sickness. The classic explanation is "sensory conflict theory": your inner ear detects movement, but other senses (like your sight) see a bunch of fixed objects that seem like they aren't going anywhere.

Stoffregen doesn't buy it. Instead, he says the issue is your muscles and other bodily systems are constantly guessing where you're about to move to control your posture, and you get discombobulated when the prediction fails. That might explain why passengers get sick but drivers usually don't, because they're controlling the car.

Either way, the confusion makes some of us nauseous, says Kristen Steenerson, a clinical associate professor at Stanford University, US, who studies the vestibular system,........

© BBC