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Why iOS 7 Is Making Some Users Feel 'Sick'

Posted by Soulskill on from the you're-not-supposed-to-eat-the-phone dept.

dryriver sends this story from The Guardian: "The introduction of fake zooms, parallax, sliding and other changes in Apple's new iPhone and iPad software has a very real effect on people with vestibular disorders. ... It makes frequent use of zoom and slide animations; the home screen boasts parallax, with icons apparently floating above subtly animating wallpaper. And it's making people sick. Triggers and symptoms vary, but TidePool mobile app developer Jenni Leder's experience is not uncommon. A self-professed power-user, she frequently switches apps; but on iOS 7, this has caused headaches and feelings associated with motion sickness. 'I now have to close my eyes or cover the screen during transitions, which is ridiculous,' she told The Guardian, adding that there's nowhere to hide: 'It's not apps that affect me, but accessing them. Tap a folder and the view zooms in. Tap an app and it's like flying through the icon and landing in that app's micro world — and I'm getting dizzy on the journey there.' Reactions to screen-based systems — especially those utilizing 3D effects — aren't new. Cynthia Ryan, executive director of the Vestibular Disorders Association, says 3D effects can cause 'intense nausea, dizziness and vertigo,' sometimes from general vision problems, but also from visual-vestibular conflict. She added symptoms 'manifest more severely if a viewer already has a disorder of the vestibular system.'"

13 of 261 comments (clear)

  1. Can't you turn the effects off? by brunes69 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I am not an iOS user, but i know in Android these effects are very easily toggleable by the user.

    1. Re:Can't you turn the effects off? by NotQuiteReal · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Same thing in Windows - first thing I do is turn off all "special" effects. They don't make me sick, but why would I want to waste a few hundred milliseconds here, a few hundred there, just to have things "animated". If I open a menu - bam, I want the menu. If I close a window, I want it gone... I don't need to have it look nice sliding in and out.

      For some of us, the appeal of "computers" is that they do what you want them to do, nothing more, nothing less (even if they had bugs, there was always a logical reason why it was doing "something you didn't ask it to do".)

      Nowadays computers are doing all sorts of stuff you don't want them to, and didn't ask them to. By design.

      --
      This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
    2. Re: Can't you turn the effects off? by M1FCJ · · Score: 3, Insightful

      If one has to summarise a single short paragraph consisting of three short sentences with a TL;DR, I think humanity need to end, now, and need to pass the baton to a more intelligent species.

  2. I for one welcome our new vomit-inducing Overlords by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    What Would Jobs Have Said?
    Love him or hate him, heads would have rolled.

  3. Why all of a sudden? by Latentius · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Not to be insensitive to people with vestibular disorders, but why is this the first I'm hearing about this? OSes from Windows to OSX to Linux to Android, etc. etc., have employed various zooming/sliding/wobbling/parallax animations for years now. I've only played with iOS 7 that smallest bit, but is it really so different from everything else that's it's causing a sudden wave of heretofore unseen motion sickness?

    1. Re:Why all of a sudden? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      This is the same problem many of us have with first person shooters. If you've heard people complain about getting motion sick while gaming, you've heard of this before.

    2. Re:Why all of a sudden? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      In general, it's worse when the effect covers a larger amount of the region you're paying attention to visually. In this case, it covers the entire screen, which is awful. There are movement effects in (for example) OSX but they are basically always against a fixed background. That's not true in iOS 7 according to TFA, where you get effects like the whole screen sliding or zooming, with acceleration and deceleration and realistic parallax effects. These effects are intended to evoke the feeling that the user is moving (as opposed to the feeling that objects are moving around on the screen), so it's not surprising that they trigger people who have what is effectively the worst case of motion sickness imaginable.

  4. That's why they hire fashion designers... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    I really don't know why so many geeks are holding out for Apple... Apple is all about pretentiousness, they only care about how stuff looks. Should we really care about those stupid animations that only slow down everything you do? That consume more battery while achieving only this WOW effect when you first use the device? The only reason for Apple to use some "new" technology is to wow people into their shitty walled iGarden. They hired the CEO from Yves Saint Laurent for gods sake...

  5. Just by cosm · · Score: 2, Insightful

    First world problems.

    --
    'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
    1. Re:Just by RedBear · · Score: 5, Insightful

      First world problems.

      Having vertigo so bad you can't even stand up without vomiting or at least falling over, much less walk or drive a vehicle to or from any kind of employment, is not the sort of easily dismissible non-problem to which that phrase is usually applied. Vertigo-induced nausea is a real, life-impacting and difficult to deal with medical issue. And you'd all better hope someone figures out exactly why this is happening and how to prevent it before someone starts putting visual interfaces like this in moving vehicles. The last thing we need is drivers on the freeway suddenly having vertigo from glancing at their in-dash navigation screen.

      But more to the point of my subject line: There is something totally bizarre happening here. The parent comment is a prime example of a sort of (for lack of a better word) "anti-compassion" that seems to have been triggered by this story. It's like a push-button that makes normal human beings explode with derisive hatred. Even the /. editors appear to be on the bandwagon. Notice how they've put quotes around the word "sick" in the article title (even though the actual news stories do not quote that word), implying that there is no actual sickness involved, and the byline is "from the you're-not-supposed-to-eat-the-phone dept.," implying that the user has to do something monumentally stupid to deliberately invoke the effect, such as staring at the phone for 10 minutes while moving it around to trigger the parallax motion. Neither of these implied things is true in the slightest. The sickness is quite real, and easily-triggered in seconds for some of those affected.

      I happened to be reading MacRumors yesterday when this story showed up in their sidebar. I checked it out and was absolutely appalled at the level of rage and vitriol in the comments that were being up-modded to the main article page. The forums were not much better. About 90% of the comments were from people who were expressing outright hatred of the "pathetic" "losers" who had dared to say that their precious iPhones were making them sick. I thought maybe there was so much backlash against the victims of nausea because it was a Mac-related forum. But coming here to /. where there is plenty of Apple-hate to go around I now realize this issue triggers a gaping primary defect in both human logic and compassion. The comments here are largely identical to the MacRumors forum posts; blaming the victims and/or unequivocally dismissing the problem as something that is either imagined, totally unimportant or completely fabricated. A large portion of the population appears to be constitutionally incapable of believing or acknowledging that this issue is real or serious, simply because it hasn't affected them personally. And it seems to go far beyond the usual "I got mine so screw you" type reaction. It's more like "I don't see the problem so FUCK YOU YOU'RE NOT FIT TO LIVE GO DIE IN A GAS CHAMBER!!!!ONE!!!!". By the way that's almost a literal quote of some of the posts I saw on MacRumors. I don't even have the imagination to begin to exaggerate what I've seen posted.

      The reaction I've seen in both of these forums is so extreme it's actually kind of terrifying. It's so far outside of my realm of understanding that it is literally giving me the shakes because it strongly implies that even after decades living on this planet I don't understand what makes the average human tick AT ALL. It's no wonder I've never liked associating with more than two humans simultaneously. Y'all SCARY. Irrational doesn't even begin to describe it.

      If I was a neurologist or psychologist I could probably get a grant to study this phenomenon.

      Final note: Even as I took the time to compose this post the dismissive parent comment went from a score of 1 to +4, Insightful. Is it because most people have never experienced debilitating motion sickness and thus cannot believe it's real? I don't know, and that's what spooks me.

  6. Bling by gr8_phk · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Those "features" are nothing more than visual bling. This suggests Apple is running out of great ideas and resorting to fancy instead of functional? I can name a whole list of UI features that would be awesome and seem innovative, while actually doing useful stuff easier.

    Parallax? That's so Angry Biirds.

  7. Re:Disable option? by roc97007 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Well, maybe these billions and billions of motion-sick people... shouldn't have upgraded?

    Would have been nice to know ahead of time. When friends ask if they should upgrade, I point them to the articles regarding motion sickness, and the warning that you can't go back once you upgrade. But that doesn't help the huge mass of people who upgraded before the problem was noticed.

    What kind of company Apple has become will be clearly delineated by their reaction to this. They could release a patch that allows you to easily shut off the animations (not just "reduce"). Or, they could deny the problem and tell people you're looking at it wrong. It'll be interesting to see which response they choose.

    --
    Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
  8. Re:So what? by janek78 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You're missing the point. It's not that we should all get down to the lowest common denominator, it's about having useless visual bling (that is annoying and distracting even for a healthy person) that serves no useful purpose and CAN'T BE SWITCHED off making the phone unusable for people with a medical condition.

    Again, the solution is not to force everyone to use a static UI, it's to give people the choice. Which is something Apple never does, I guess because then there would be people who switch it off and then complain that it does not work. I am an iPhone 5 user recently switched from Android and while the phone works just fine, I sorely miss the ability to actually customise anything.