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You’ve been there, sitting in the passenger seat of a car, trying to focus intently on your phone as a way to ignore all your karaoke-belting seatmates. And then there’s a lurch, or a buildup of motion that causes a swirl of unease in your gut. What you’re feeling is the onset of motion sickness, and it forces you to look away from the screen and stare out the window like a commoner, lest you hurl.
Well, that may be a thing of the past. Apple introduced a software feature called Vehicle Motion Cues on iOS and iPadOS to stave off motion sickness while looking at your phone. The update comes as part of a larger release of new accessibility features on Apple devices.
Motion sickness occurs when you’re paying attention to something stable—like your phone, or a book—while your surroundings are moving around you. (Sensitivity to this sensory clash could also come from issues with inner ear development.)
The way the motion cues work to fix that is delightful. To trick your brain into synchronizing your stable handheld and the moving surroundings, Apple will use your iPhone or iPad’s sensors to detect the subtle movements of the vehicle you’re in. Then, it will display small dots alongside the edges of your screen that move along with the car, ideally syncing up as you move and preventing that disconnect between sight and sensation. Users will be able to turn the feature on and off in their device's settings.
Apple also introduced several other accessibility updates along with the motion sickness reduction. Eye tracking will now be available as an alternative method of device navigation on iPhones and iPads. A music haptics feature makes it easier for Deaf or hard of hearing people to feel the music they listen to via subtle vibrations in the devices. There are also better voice-control features that understand atypical speech, more accessibility options in VisionOS, and Live Captions for video across most of Apple’s devices.
Here’s some more consumer tech news.
One Brick to Rule Them All
Do you fantasize about one day constructing your very own spire of doom from which to turn a fiery gaze upon your barren lands? Well, now you can, at least in Lego form.
Lego has a new Lord of the Rings–themed sculpture set that will be sure to appeal to all the Dark Lords out there. The Lord of the Rings: Barad-Dûr set is an upcoming Lego set that, when built, will stand more than two and a half feet tall. But the set is also modular, which means if you have more than one set (wink, wink) you can stack them.
As you can tell by the giant fiery eyeball at the top, it’s the slightly more evil of the titular Two Towers featured in the Lord of the Rings books and movies, where the Dark Lord Sauron chilled menacingly for most of the story. The set—which is objectively rad as hell—contains 5,471 pieces and costs $460. The great eye atop the spire glows when plugged in, and every bit of the tower is chock-full of the nefarious goings-on of orcs, spiders, and skeletons. It also comes with minifigs of iconic LotR characters (including an appropriately disturbing Gollum). If you order it in the first week it is available, Lego will throw in a sick Nazgul-riding Ringwraith on top of it all.
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The Barad-Dûr set isn’t available quite yet, but Lego says it will be available June 1 this year. If you’re hankering to tinker with something similar that is available now, Lego has a 6,167-piece, $500 model of the Elven City of Rivendell. That should keep you busy until June.
Bot to Give It Up
Sony Music wants to crack down on the AI companies using its licensed music to train their algorithms.
Sony sent letters, which were reported on by the Financial Times, to hundreds of AI developers, tech companies, and streaming services, including OpenAI, Apple, Google, and Spotify. The music giant’s outreach is intended to ward off companies like OpenAI that are eager to train AI models off already existing, human-generated music, and encourage platforms like Apple and Spotify to hold the line against letting subsequent AI-generated music flood their platforms.
The move from Sony Music—which is one of the three major corporate music labels, along with Universal Music and Warner Music—comes as companies are building AI offerings that feel increasingly, seriously, lifelike. Earlier this week, Google showed off its latest AI music-generation and DJ software at its huge developer event. Speaking of which …
Unpacking I/O
Google’s I/O developer conference was this week in Mountain View, California. The company used the in-person event to announce the absolute maximum amount of AI news it could cram into the nearly two-hour keynote. There are a lot of new AI features, manifesting as Android updates, ChatGPT competition, and fundamental shifts in how Google Search works.
This week on Gadget Lab, WIRED senior writers Lauren Goode and Paresh Dave talk about their experience at I/O this year and how some of the many AI features Google announced may be poised to completely upend the internet.
