When people are freed from the monotony of driving cars, one of the biggest promises of fully autonomous travel is that passengers could use their newfound free time in their vehicles to catch up on work, read a book, or binge on the latest Netflix offerings. That sounds nice, at least in theory. But those potential benefits might never come to fruition for a sizable percentage of vehicle occupants.
Motion sickness affects roughly half of passengers who currently attempt to read books in vehicles, according to Michael Sivak of the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI). Once drivers give up a connection to the vehicle?s movements through direct control and morph into passengers, many more people may suffer from this problem. The cause is a conflict between the visual and vestibular cues that a person feels when they?re not directly watching the road ahead. Sivak and his fellow researcher Brandon Schoettle of UMTRI have patented a potential fix.
They have developed a system that uses pulses of light to mimic the visual cues a person would get by looking out the vehicle. It matches the vestibular inputs related to the vehicle?s velocity, acceleration, yaw rate, and lateral movement. Light can be delivered from a wearable device that looks like a pair of goggles or glasses as well as from other light panels embedded in the cabin.

?Elimination of outside visual motion stimuli, while retaining the motion stimuli within the vestibular system,...