Self driving cars may make you barf

If you're the kind of person who gets nausaeus or car sick when you're riding in a car, bad days ahead, becuase as autonomous cars begin to be present on our roads you're always gonna be a passenger. Even if you're sitting in the driver's seat, if it's self driving You are a passenger. And all the things that make you sick being in the other sites will start to happen here. So you can either sit out the next 10 or 20 years of driving innovation. I don't think you'd be watching this video if you are that kind of person. Or you can hope one of this technology's does well. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] University of Michigan researchers have identified three major buckets of things that happen in the car that can make you nauseous in the car. First of all is the lack of anticipation. An autonomous car will do things that you didn't know it was going to do, and that can through you off and make you Get sick and there's a lack of motion control. Whatever it's doing you don't have the ability to have a feedback loop with because your not part of controlling and that can throw you off. But the big one is when there's a disconnect between your inner ear and your eyes. Vestibular stimuli. So if you have this feeling of motion in your inner ear but your eyes are looking somewherelse that doesn't portray that motion There's the big disconnect that can make you nauseous and all of this can happen readily in self driving cars. [MUSIC] Overall U of M researchers estimate that 6 to 12% of us are very prompt to. To having car sickness especially exacerbated by those three factors that will all be present in self-driving cars. So, what do we do about it? That same university has got a patent out for a stimuli system. A series of LED lights that will portray motion happening now and telegraph motion, the car is about to take. This could be done through something you wear or some kind of glasses with LEDs like in [UNKNOWN]. Or there could be LEDs around the [UNKNOWN] of the car's interior. They catch your peripheral vision without you having to look out the windshield or look specifically at those indicators. So if I'm looking like this reading, looking at my phone, i'll still get some indication of what's going on that ties my inner ear and my eyes together. Now, Uber, as you know, is all gung-ho for not just blocking city traffic like that, but also rolling out a fleet of self driving cars to block city traffic like that. If that's gonna work, and they're not gonna be hosing out every eighth ride after someone pukes, they're gonna need to manage this situation. One of the ways they foresee is to use some of those Indicators like U of M thinks of, but also to use sort of distracting stimuli. Little puffs of air they think might do the job. Or vibrating seat impulses to kind of take your mind off the disconnect that you're feeling. In autonomy. Here's one that's really out there. A company International Auto Components that makles a lot of interiors for cara makers, says that they can take all these parts in the car and turn them into aroma-therapy emenators. Maybe they'll give off a lavendar scent, or ginseng, or some other kind of aroma therapy. And that they say could work on certain receptors in the body, in the mind, in the nose and cure nausea while driving. Now you might laugh at that until you realize it's been kind of accepted wisdom for. For a while, that ginger is used to tamp down nausea that comes from using VR. Either taking a giner candy, drinking ginger tea, what have you. There might be something to this. Perhaps the simplest way to try and cure autonomous driving Nausea is right here, what's called the daylight opening. You call it the side window, but car designers call this the DLO, the daylight opening. It's all these big cutouts in the greenhouse of the car where they put glass. Now the recent trend in cars has been to bring up this belt line, maybe bring down this roof line, slope this windshield dramatically and you end up getting more of a bunker in here. Not good if you want to have your eyes picking up more random input that reinforce what your inner ear is feeling. Seeing speed, seeing motion. So that could change the very nature of car design. As we go forward and make them more autonomous they may have to look different as a result to keep people from getting sick. The last technique that's interesting around this area of keeping you from being green while you're being driven is to alter the software of soft driving cars to make their transitions very gradual. No dramatically fast acceleration or braking, even if you're a performance brand. When you're in autonomous mode, I think cars need to be very low dynamic on their transitions. Be very gradual to accelerate and brake, and to turn and to lane correct. That will do less to create high inputs in your vestibular part of your ear that will not agree with your eye. [MUSIC] All of these may sound a little silly and like the least important thing to sweat on autonomous driving. But I've got a feeling we have more car-sick people than we've ever discovered before, that autonomy is going to surface. And this has been a problem in the past with 3D TV and already with VR. And those are areas that took it seriously and yet had much lower stakes than the auto business. [SOUND] [BLANK_AUDIO]