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UP TO A THIRD of Americans experience motion sickness, according to the National Institutes of Health. In a car, the condition tends to flare when you're a passenger rather than the driver, and it gets worse when you're engaged in something other than looking out the window such as reading or using a handheld device, for example. This sizeable segment of society could miss out on some of the key benefits of self-driving cars.
“One of the great promises of autonomous vehicles, to give time by freeing us from driving, is at risk if we can't solve the motion sickness problem,” says Monica Jones, a research scientist at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI). “If it's not mitigated in some way, motion sickness may affect people's willingness to adopt driverless cars.”
The research team has developed the first repeatable and reliable testing protocol for evaluating specific real-world driving maneuvers...