iOS 7 Animations Causing Some People to Feel Nausea

As with every iOS launch, the complaints are in. New design, new problem: the zooming and the parallax animations cause — alongside battery life issues, which I experienced myself in the first few days on my iPad 4 — motion sickness, some users report (via The Verge).

As Ensorceled, a user who started the discussion on Apple support communities, writes, the “zoom animations everywhere in the new iOS 7 are literarily making me nauseous and giving me a headache. It’s exactly how I used to get car sick if I tried to read in the car.”

His entry received lots of replies, with the majority complaining about headaches and nauseousness as a result of the animations built into iOS 7.

“I had severe vertigo the minute I started using my iPad with iOS 7,” says Apple forum user glassrabit. “Lost the rest of the day to it.” Another user, nybe, writes, “I had to go home ‘sick’ from work because of the intense nausea due to using my iPhone with iOS 7.”

Fact is, the latest mobile operating system includes a “Reduce Motion” option, but this is apparently for reducing the parallax effect – which, by the way, will save you precious minutes of battery life.

RJV Berlin, a commenter with alleged experience in the visually induced motion sickness and visual stress field, was surprised to see Apple implementing these animations, without identifying this as an issue:

What IS surprising is that Apple neither foresaw it nor identified the issue from beta tester feedback (or worse, failed to take that seriously). I can understand an industrial designer like Ive more used to working on physical objects could be unaware of the effects visual displays can have on people, especially if they move, but surely he must have had computer graphics experts in his team…

This is a health issue comparable to epileptic attacks caused by certain kinds of flicker, first observed on a large scale because of a now infamous episode on Japanese TV. I think it’s serious enough for Apple to provide EITHER a very rapid update that allows to disable animations or reduce their duration significantly (something I think should be configurable anyway, at least after an initial hour or so of having “admired” them …) OR a well documented way to downgrade back to 6.1x (and sign that release again, of course).

As a workaround, users have ended up downgrading to iOS 6, which didn’t have these animations.

What about you? Any iOS 7 side effects?