You might be looking at my iPhone on the right over there and thinking, “What are all those dots around the edge and why are they moving like that?” Well, this is an optional new feature in iOS 18 called Vehicle Motion Cues, and the idea is if you’re someone who suffers with motion sickness, using this on your device whilst in the car may help reduce some of those symptoms that you experience.
I’ll show you how we can enable this feature and then explain a bit about how it’s meant to work. So we’re going to jump into the Settings app and tap onto Accessibility. On here, you’re going to look for the Motion section, and when you tap onto there, there’s a new toggle called Vehicle Motion Cues. We’ll tap onto there.
Now you can choose to have this on all the time, off all the time, or automatic so it should enable itself when it detects you’re in a moving vehicle. I’ll turn it on for now so you can see it working, and straight away those dots will appear on the edge of my screen.
Now, the idea with those dots is that they’ll provide a visual anchor. So when your device or vehicle is moving, those dots should remain more or less in place, which hopefully will reduce those motion sickness symptoms you may experience.
Now, I haven’t had a chance to test this yet because I usually drive myself in the car, so I can’t drive and use my phone – that would be incredibly dangerous. But on the screen here, I’m gently tilting my phone and you’ll see those dots moving in real time. And these apply across the whole operating system – any app that you use, for example Photos, will display those dots as well. If your phone moves more dramatically, you’ll get more dots, and less dramatically, less dots. All those sort of things are built in as standard.
You can also add this as a toggle in Control Centre, which means you can really quickly turn it on and off whenever you want to. And I’m going to do that by pulling down from the top right corner to open Control Centre and then tapping and holding a blank space to go into edit mode. From here at the bottom, I’m going to add a new control and I’m just going to search for “vehicle”. Ah, that’s it, that’s the toggle I want. So I’ll add that into my Control Centre, and I’m just going to pull that handle to make it a little bit bigger.
Now whenever I want to enable or disable this feature, I can simply do it in Control Centre without having to go into Settings. And this is just one of many, many new things in iOS 18 that can help make your phone more interesting and more useful and more personal than it was before.
If you want to learn what else has changed, like all these new Control Centre things for example, please check out my channel down below. Or if you’d like a complete guide to everything new in iOS 18, I’ve got you covered as well. I’ve written an eBook this year called ‘100 QuickTips for iOS 18’. It’s available on the link below and it will show you all of the things that your phone can now do in friendly and easy-to-understand language. And that’s it, I’ll see you all next time.