Car sickness while looking at your phone is a common problem for passengers, and Apple built a feature specifically to help. It’s called Vehicle Motion Cues, and it works by placing subtle animated dots along the edges of your screen. These dots shift in sync with the vehicle’s movement, giving your eyes a visual reference that can ease the sensory mismatch behind motion sickness, all without covering up or disrupting whatever you’re actually doing on the screen.
Here’s how to set up Vehicle Motion Cues:
- Open Settings.
- Select Accessibility, then select Motion.
- Choose Vehicle Motion Cues and pick a setting. The Automatic option is the most hands-off: your iPhone senses when you’re in a moving car or similar vehicle and displays the dots on its own, then removes them once the ride stops.
- Prefer manual control instead? Open Control Center, tap the Vehicle Motion Cues icon, and pick your setting from there.
Turning on Vehicle Motion Cues takes less than a minute, but it can make a real difference on your next road trip if scrolling or reading in the car usually leaves you queasy. Try the Automatic setting first so your iPhone handles it for you, then switch to manual control through Control Center whenever you want more say over when the dots appear.
