Ease motion sickness on your MacBook with Vehicle Motion Cues

Why it happens

Motion sickness often comes from a mismatch: your body feels the car or train moving while your eyes see a still screen. Vehicle Motion Cues shows small dots that sway with the vehicle's movement, so what you see matches what you feel. It's for passengers only, never for whoever is driving.

How to fix it

1. Open the Apple menu, choose System Settings, and click Accessibility in the sidebar.

2. Click Motion, then turn on Vehicle Motion Cues. Dots appear near the edges of your screen while the vehicle moves.

   Accessibility›Motion›Vehicle Motion Cues

3. On macOS 27 you can change how the dots look. Click Customize Appearance and try Larger dots, More dots, a different Color, or the Regular or Dynamic pattern.

   Accessibility›Motion›Vehicle Motion Cues›Customize Appearance

4. Turn it off again in the same place when you're back on solid ground, if you don't want the dots at your desk.

Vehicle Motion Cues is in Accessibility > Motion on both macOS 26 and 27. The Customize Appearance options for the dots are on macOS 27, and macOS 26 may not have them.

Still not fixed?

1. Don't see Vehicle Motion Cues at all? It's only on Mac laptops, and not on the MacBook Air with M1, the 13-inch MacBook Pro with M1, or older models. Desktop Macs don't have it.

2. Big animations can make the queasiness worse. Turn on Reduce motion in the same Motion settings to swap them for simple fades.

   Accessibility›Motion›Reduce motion

3. Small habits help too: sit facing forward, look out of the window now and then, and take short breaks from the screen.

4. If Vehicle Motion Cues is missing on a Mac laptop that should have it, install the latest update in General > Software Update first. If it's still missing, or the dots don't follow the vehicle at all, contact Apple Support.