| Seems pretty straightforward. 1. Be a developer and you (or a spouse/child/friend) get motion sickness when looking at the phone while travelling. 2. We’ve known the mechanisms of motion sickness (looking at something static while your inner ear indicates you’re moving) from before smartphones were a thing. 3. We already have a ton of information on the phone to know when we’re in a vehicle, how fast we’re moving, direction, so on. 4. Try adding something to the static screen so it moves in tandem with you and thus reduce the cause of motion sickness. 5. Get the people who get sick to try it out. If anything, I’m surprised it took a decade and a half to come up with it. |
Why it isn't likely to have happened before: trying is only easy for a developer who is not only very familiar with the API for reading those motion sensors but also with the API for system wide overlay. This a strict no for your run of the mill to-do list app. Combine that with the requirement of being affected themselves (or someone close), having the idea, having the time to try and no competing side quests that take up all attention. And the requirement of when the experiment was successful, having the kind of access that actually serves as a conduit for ideas not only on paper to someone in the position to make it a product. That's a lot of stars that need to align. Personally I wouldn't even be surprised if there was an LLM angle: would still need someone in the know to try it, but chances are that knowledge combined with a bit of prompting could be a path to PoC implementation that could clear effort thresholds that would stand in the way of conventional coding.