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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?
Except that doesn't disable animations. All it does it removes the parallax effect as clearly mentioned in the article.
The lack of a solution is the bigger problem. Apple provides a "Reduce Motion" option within the iOS 7 Settings app, but it is poorly labelled; it merely disables the parallax effect, but doesn't stop zooming or sliding.
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.
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.
Sorry, your body has been found to be incompatible with this Apple product, please upgrade your body before continuing.
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.
In a nutshell, vestibular disorders are weird and the triggers are subtle. Certain movements won't bother most people, but if you smooth them out, adjust the speed, tweak the effect, things get weird.
I went through an episode of labyrinthitis (an inner ear problem) a few years ago, and it was crazy what would and wouldn't trigger problems. For example, I could watch videos of someone running a dog in agility, but first-person video of any kind was nasty and when that tsunami trashed Japan, I nearly hurled trying to watch footage of the waves on Youtube. I could actually run my dog in agility, spinning and sprinting and and dodging and pretty much anything physical while standing up, but being in a moving vehicle or even just bending over... ugh.
Log in or piss off.
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.
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.
Yes, other operating systems and interfaces have implemented similar effects. But Apple implemented them everywhere possible. Just unlocking the screen causes a zoom-out-to-your-previously-opened-app effect. I can't say that it makes me sick, but it can be disorienting and distracting. It's definitely a case of effects for effects sake.
There isn't much you can do on the system without triggering some 3d effect.
"Lame" - Galaxar
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.
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.
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.
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.