What's the news?
Citroen reckons that it has managed to cure motion sickness. No, not with some clever bit of suspension technology, but with a quirky set of goggles, called SEETROEN (SEE, ahem, what they did there?).
They look odd but the principle behind them is simple - there's a spirit-level-live fluid built into the goggles that provides an artificial horizon. Basically, when you're in a car, you're often looking at a surface that's not moving (a book, an iPad, the back of the seat in front) but your brain can detect that there's movement and motion going on. The feeling of nausea comes from the conflict between those two incoming signals.
The fluid in the SEETROEN goggles, by creating an aircraft-like artificial horizon, visible in your peripheral vision, helps to calm that effect, and sends the right signal through the eyes that, yes, your environment is moving around and not standing still.
The goggles were developed for Citroen by Boarding Ring, a start-up company based in Var, south of France. The Boarding Ring technology is a patented and tested paramedical solution that has an effectiveness rating of 95 per cent. The reason that there's little spare goggles on the sides is not for people with broadly-spaced eyes (hammerhead shark with motion sickness, maybe?) but because of the need to have a horizon for both the frontal axis (right/left) and sagittal axis (front/back).
The white soft-touch plastic glasses were designed by 5.5, a collective design studio based in Paris, "to reflect Citroen's fresh, simple and ergonomic style." According to Citroen, motion sickness (also known as Kinetosis) affects over 30 million people. One in three people experience travel sickness symptoms at least once in their life.
The idea is to pop the goggles on as soon as you start to feel the onset of motion sickness, and they should help to stabilise your sense of motion in about 10-12 minutes. You should be able to take them off again after that.
We're not sure we'd ever take them off, though. They're pretty cool, no?