Uber Wants To Fix Motion Sickness In Self-Driving Cars

With self-driving cars looking to become the future in which how we are ferried from one location to another, it also means a potential boost in productivity, where instead of focusing on driving, people can focus on work, replying to emails, finishing up a presentation, all while being driven to their destination.

However Uber believes that these activities could lead to motion sickness, and in a recently discovered patent (via The Guardian), Uber has come up with an idea on how to combat that. The patent reads, “With the advent of autonomous vehicle technology, rider attention may be focused on alternative activities, such as work, socialising, reading, writing, task-based activities and the like. As the autonomous vehicle travels along an inputted route, kinetosis (motion sickness) can result from the perception of motion by a rider not corresponding to the rider’s vestibular [balance and spatial orientation] senses.”

Uber’s plan includes stimulating the rider of the vehicle through a variety of methods, such as having the seats vibrate when the car brakes, or the seats in the car could turn and spin according to the car turning, or there could even be light bars or scenes shown inside the car to give the occupant an idea of what the car plans to do, such as turn, accelerate, brake, and so on.

Whether or not this method will work remains to be seen, but there is a lot about self-driving cars that have yet to be explored/discovered, but with Uber ordering 24,000 self-driving cars from Volvo, the company is definitely interested in exploring it further.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Transportation
Tags: Patent, Self-Driving Cars, Uber