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Why iOS 7 Is Making Some Users Feel 'Sick'
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.'"
I am not an iOS user, but i know in Android these effects are very easily toggleable by the user.
It's now been replaced, with a brand new phone of the same configuration at no cost to myself. That is brilliant customer service, Apple. Cheers.
... wait, what?
Is there really no way to disable the animations? Could you customize the wallpaper to be a single colour so there is no visible movement?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
...and now I feel sick too!
What Would Jobs Have Said?
"They're looking at it wrong." "Apple products just aren't for everybody." etc.
This is the guy who wanted all media apps to look like the current trend (at the time) brushed metal of stereo gear, but I thought skeuomorphism was dead under new Apple?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Okey, this might not have any relevance at all, but I thought that it was quite funny, so I decided to post a little anecdote. Quakeworld - a quake 1 'mod' - tends to give me motion sickness if I'm not used to it. It takes approximately 3 weeks to accustom to its effects. Watching demos, though. Playing takes about 1 week. Quake 3 on the other hand gave me another kind of motion sickness, but only the Quake3 final. Quake3 test 1.08 was simply fine and impressive. None of the above stated effects. To pick a winner, Wolfenstein gave me perhaps the worst motion sickness from all the games I played/watched. I could go on but this rant is ridiculous enough as it is, later. :>
I'm pretty sure this is a violation of Microsoft's patent on Software as a Sickness.
Okey, this might not have any relevance at all, but I thought that it was quite funny, so I decided to post a little anecdote. Quakeworld - a quake 1 'mod' - tends to give me motion sickness if I'm not used to it.
These guys need to get accounts or I need to get mod points. Apple should have known better, considering that this effect was known fifteen years or more ago; I had a fairly popular Quake site back then (1998-2003) and got quite a few emails from readers talking about this in Quake II, and bigger sites than mine were covering it as well.
Research fail on Apple's part. Hubris or stupidity? Both?
Free Martian Whores!
YES you can turn them off in the settings in iOS7. By the way the next version of Android will have a screen lock wallpaper of hypnotoad. You can turn it off but strangely you feel compelled not to. Everyone would be talking about this but hypnotoad tells them not to.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
TidePool mobile app developer Jenni Leder's experience is not uncommon. A self-professed power-user...
She's a mobile app developer. Why would she give up a phone whose users comprise the bulk of her earnings. Android users don't buy as many apps. I would say that makes you the "dumbass".
Where she falls down is first, didn't she have the developer versions to test, and second, why didn't she report it back then.
This is not new. Apple does not seem to have any competent GUI people anymore, just "designers". And of course, competent testing would have found that problem. I expect in a while we will be hearing that thy did know this but management did not took it seriously. Like the the one time where Apple management thought thy knew more about antenna design that the guys that do it for a living.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Lucille Austero was an iPhone user?
I just can't be bothered.
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?
To stop idiots from looking only at their iphones for hours while walking and even driving.
Sorry, your body has been found to be incompatible with this Apple product, please upgrade your body before continuing.
Ah--they want everyone to feel nauseous like Steve Jobs was.
When are they going to patent this effect?
I, for one, welcome our new hypnotoad overlords.
Some of what I say is fact, some is conjecture, the rest I'm just blowing out my ass...you guess.
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...
You really shouldn't repost articles from other websites in their entirety. You've just taken advertising dollars away from information week, and indirectly from the authors pocket, and given them to Dice, and indirectly, idiots like Timothy lord.
That's lose - lose all the way around.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
As usual on /., many commenters above failed to either read the article or actually try it themselves.
You can turn off the background paralax effect. But, really, that is quite subtle and not that objectionable. I turned it off, simply because I figured it eats CPU, GPU or both unnecessarily.
The new animations are gratuitious - they don't seem to serve any useful purpose. They are just plain silly-looking. Home-page icons now fly-in from all different angles. Drag a page, and now you are no longer dragging a skewmorphic piece of paper, but a skewmorphic sheet of silly-putty - drag at the right side, and the page warps, your finger "stretches" the right-hand side of the page. This kind of stuff was all the rage on Linux desktops - about 5 years ago. By now, everybody still running Linux has gotten tired of it and turned that nonsense off. The "bounce" now has a "warp" effect as part of it as well - the page deforms when it bounces.
It's like playing a bad ho-hum video game where they amped-up the effects because of lack of compelling content.
No, you can't disable these effects.
I'd imagine that if there is a medical issue with this, it is worse on iPad, because it fills more of your field of view when you are using it.
Well, yes you can. You can downgrade to a device that Apple has deemed incapable of rendering these effects. I think you need, say, an iPhone 4.
Apple seems to have become recently brain-dead when it comes to practical aspects of UI. And I hate to say it, but it must be due to Ivy, because they were quite good about it before. He is really, really good at designing appealing surfaces and finishes and packaging. UIs, not so much.
Another example of the non-functionaly of the new UI - buttons. It seems now that many buttons have absolute NO feedback that you have pressed them. I imagine the concept here is that the button is meant to perform some action, and the action itself is the confirmation that the button was pressed.
(Of course, a button is a skewmorphism, and we don't want skewmorphisms, right? So, I guess I shouldn't say "button" but "that word that's a bit bigger and fatter than the other words, and is off by iteself, that if you touch it something happens"...)
Somebody should have telegraphed that message to the poor developers who were given the impossible task to insure that the "action" happens soon enough for the user to connect their touching something on the screen with the "action" - regardless of the amount of work the action might take, and, oh, regardless of any other background processing that might be going-on in the device. Well, actually, I suppose somebody did, and those developers probably now feel like shit for having failed, even thought they could not have possibly suceeded.
Point taken about reposting an article in it's entirety. Thank you for enlightening me.
First world problems.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
I don't have a vestibular disorder, but Apple products have always made me sick. Or is it annoyed? Yeah, I think that's the word I am looking for.
Many visually impaired individuals can't use anything but a terminal off a refreshable braille display... Are we to ban all GUIs now?
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.
hypnotoad, hypnotoad. what is hypnotoad?
oh,wait... never mind ........
hail hypnotoad
IPhones use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse-width_modulation (PWM) to dim its display cycling on and off rapidly above the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flicker_fusion_threshold not only is this annoying and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asthenopia inducing to some it is wholly unnecessary.
What is happening with the animations at certain brightness levels http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duty_cycleof the PWM creates a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resonance
with screen movements shadowed by the moving appendages. You can see this effect by turning down brightness on your monitor and waving your finger rapidly in front of the screen. If you see distinct fingers rather than continuous blur through the motion you too are being made http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasicknessby the effect of http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cut_corners. The solution is to jack up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminance to 100% until your phones battery melts into a pool of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithiumlithium ions...no seriously just turn off the stupid animation feature. So much whining can be avoided with so few seconds of googling. Just take my advice and stay off the crack formerly known as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia.
The way to find out about this sort of problem is to field-test the late beta design, run it through a lot of focus groups, power users and grannies and teenagers, folks with visual handicaps etc. and then analyse the data and revise the design if necessary before releasing v1.0 to the public. Of course if you want to keep the look and feel of your GUI a close secret it's difficult to do that but it gives some important folks a chance to stand up on stage and say "and just one last thing..."
Because trial lawyers can see down into the deepest pockets on Wall Street.
> Research fail on Apple's part. Hubris or stupidity? Both?
Jobs isn't around anymore.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Maybe it was all the other B.S. "U/X" crap that you cannot change...like the emaciated font for the lock screen time/date
The reason is "U/X"...or more specifically, to justify all the money they budgeted for 'user experience designers' in the design process.
Everyone knows the user is the most important part of the equation and that 'good design' is good. After that, its like debating the definition of 'feminism' at a gun show. There is absolutely no guiding *science-based* ontology to digital design. There are attempts, sure (looking at you Ben Shneiderman) but it is far too abstract to formalize.
The trend now is to have a "U/X" division sort of grafted into existing development pipelines of large companies. Like a sort added appendage. They spend millions hiring these grads with tech degrees but no actual design work experience. The result is essentially a bunch of psychobabble that describes common design decisions that are handled somewhere else in the process. It's a trainwreck. Here's why:
"U/X" is just a continuation of the industry's tendency to recycle concepts with new nomenclature every time anti-user design becomes industry standard.
They spend the money so they have to justify its existence. It comes from the project leaders, who have to justify every budget item to the big big bosses (accountants). Hence these animation features and such are all by default turned 'on' and not easily disabled.
Putting the user first is easy. Microsoft (and a host of others) **know** what the user wants. That's not the problem. The problem is their business model! They have to bottleneck features (reduce usability) in order to profit somehow. Facebook is the same with user data. Their IPO lists 'user privacy initiatives' as a threat to revenue.
Don't get me started on what passes for 'usability research' in Silicon Valley. People talk like "A/B testing" is some sort of hot new tech thing...it's not...in the research science world the types of "A/B" tests companies like Apple and Microsoft do to test their products on everyday users is mind numbingly reductive and small scale.
It's all a product of bad management and flimsy academic science.
The *real* usability innovation is in crafting business models that do not require bottlenecking features to coerce the user.
Thank you Dave Raggett
Microsoft Zune & Windows Phone had this parallax feature for years. It was on the first Zune HD back in 2009.
Why didn't we ever hear about people getting sick on their Zunes and Windows Phones?
Oh, wait, nevermind.
Kriston
My question is: why don't the manufacturers imitate the way eyes actually work?
Use a bit of motion at first, a flick (maybe motion blurred) to the approximate final location, and then a minimal amount of settling-down to finish the glance/move. A look around or slide could use a few flicks/jumps instead of an unnaturally smooth scroll, which would disrupt the sickening feel.
It might not be the best for FP games where the player is wanting to catch every detail, but in others, it could increase the psychological realism (ie., being able to better use corner-of-the-eye, dimly-glimpsed or thing-in-the-shadows effects. It would certainly improve UI controls, and might even provide the optical illusion of faster operation.
Thankfully, I don't have any of those disorders, but I did experience disorientation for a about 3 days or so, getting used to the UI motion. I still don't care for it, even when you reduce it in the preferences, it's still comes across as flashy, like an annoyance. I'm actually not a big fan of the interface redesign. Overall, my experience of this phone (5S) is not like going from a 3GS to 4S. It was neat, but not exciting. Apple can (and should) do better.
Judging from the reaction to the UI, it seems like they make a lot of assumptions about customers and what they want.
Just switch the fancy effects off, dummy. Oh, wait, it's Apple, nevermind. And that kids is why some of us stick with Linux, no matter how quirky and buggy can sometimes interface (mis)behave.
Troll 2.0 Fear my asocial networking!
... yet we have no epidemic of people vomiting while playing video games.
There's a multitude that feel sick playing certain games, as another poster pointed out above - what's a trigger for one individual may be perfectly ok for another who is sensitive to another motion. It's been noted for years, but it's now just like car sickness - you don't hear it reported every time someone feels sick in a car now.
I have a friend who definitely does throw up when retrying FPS and finally gave up; so most people just know and don't buy/play the game - but in this case the cause of the symptoms has been pushed onto a device they may have been using happily for a while with no ill-effects. Definitely news worthy?
In an appropriate turn of events, it's been reported now because the effects are, for the first time, being used extensively "... on a mobile device"
As much as I find Apple a disagreeable company, you really should have known better than to install a beta-quality OS on your phone. I don't think Google would have personally done any different in this instance, though it may have been easier to reverse yourself.
What Would Jobs Have Said?
"They're looking at it wrong." "Apple products just aren't for everybody." etc.
Heh. He would have gone on to explain that Apple makes premium products for premium people, and if you are susceptible to motion sickness, then perhaps you are not worthy of owning the Apple brand... :-)
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
A simple Google search (or maybe the wayback machine) would have told them.
Free Martian Whores!
Whats next. Loud voices make people cry.
Hear, hear!
Some people are sensitive to light. I have the brightness on my phone turned almost all the way down. People ask me why the screen is so dim, but it looks awful bright to me.
Required reading for internet skeptics
This could become worse than the Dancing Plague of 1518 or the June Bug epidemic of 1962!
Worse, this shows every sign of being a hysterical contagion, capable of being transmitted over the Internet and infecting it's victims through contact with their computers, tablets, and smartphones!
The good news is that I know of a possible cure, and if I can reach my Kickstarter goal of $500,000, I can begin work on a treatment for the unfortunate victims...
Who are these people? Are they trust fund babies? Do they not work for a living? Do they not have classes?
Put down the phone and do your work and/or course work. It might be that your body is trying to tell you something. You are an addict and you need to go outside and interact with regular people instead of wasting your life on Facebook and/or twitter. Seriously, get a life.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Why didn't we ever hear about people getting sick on their Zunes and Windows Phones?
Because it was a commonly accepted feature of Microsoft products?
It's been known for some time that visual effects can and will induce epileptic seizures in some individuals and once this update causes one, there will be a lawsuit against Apple. Oh well, Apple does design some decent hardware but in this case, the idiots need to be forced to use the new effects rapidly until they puke their guts out or die from a Gran Mal seizure,
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
People who don't know they have the disorder can now get checked-out. It's a feature, not a bug !
You can turn all that stuff off, right ?
Plugging in an infernal Apple-approved cable into an infernal PC and dealing with iTunes in order to update or access a file made me sick a long time ago.
But on the flip side I didn't have to use up energy to click a link to the actual article and deal with ads in my face.
Personally, I like the parallax and the other zoomy things.... but I don't have a phone that will do iOS7.... looks nice though.
We had a term for it: Doom Induced Motion Sickness, an example of what doctors call simulator sickness.