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How to reduce background motion, Parallax on iOS 7

Getting motion sickness from the background moving on iOS 7? Here's how you can reduce the amount of motion.

Jason Cipriani Contributing Writer, ZDNet
Jason Cipriani is based out of beautiful Colorado and has been covering mobile technology news and reviewing the latest gadgets for the last six years. His work can also be found on sister site CNET in the How To section, as well as across several more online publications.
Jason Cipriani

Jason Cipriani/CNET

When Apple unveiled iOS 7 during its annual World Wide Developers Conference back in June, one of the first features shown off was a background that moves as you move your phone. The feature, called Parallax, shifts the point of view of your background image and icons to match how you're holding the phone.

Instead of being a feature that adds needed functionality, this is strictly a feature for good looks. And for those who find it to be a pointless feature, it can easily be lessened. To get started go to Settings > General > Accessibility.

Screenshot by Jason Cipriani/CNET

Select the Reduce Motion option from the Accessibility menu.

While the feature is called Parallax by Apple, you won't find that title anywhere on your device. The backgrounds that move around the most are labeled Dynamic, while the setting to turn off Parallax is titled Reduce Motion. You still with me?

As you can see, turning off this feature will not remove all motion affects implemented in iOS 7, but will simply reduce them. While reducing may not sound like it does all that much, in my testing I found it to have a dramatic impact on how much the background moves when tilting my device.

Watch this: Fix iOS 7's most annoying quirks