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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.
I'm pretty sure this is a violation of Microsoft's patent on Software as a Sickness.
Probably because of Apple's extremely annoying policy that you cannot downgrade iOS anymore a couple of days after they release a new version. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHSH_Blob for more details. The ability to downgrade to iOS 6.1.3/6.1.4 was disabled around 22 September.
Since iOS 7 was only released recently, there are probably still quite a few devices with iOS 6.1.3/6.1.4 in the channel, and that person probably got such a device in exchange for his iOS 7 "upgraded" one.
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Sorry, your body has been found to be incompatible with this Apple product, please upgrade your body before continuing.
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.
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.
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.