The engineers at Citroën have apparently thrown almost 100 years of French design refinement out the window with a new product you don’t drive, but that will improve your motoring experience. The carmaker’s new Seetroën glasses won’t win you any style points, but Citroën claims the glasses will eliminate any motion sickness you’re feeling after wearing them for just 10 minutes.
Motion sickness occurs when your brain gets conflicting reports about perceived motion from the inner ear and eyes, which each experience a ride in a moving vehicle differently.
It isn’t as big a problem when a passenger is looking out a window — there the sensations of motions usually properly correlate. But looking down at a phone or a tablet in a car can be a one-way ticket to vomitville.
So how are these goofy glasses supposed to alleviate the problem? The frames feature something called Boarding Ring technology, developed by a company of the same name, which is marketing-talk for “they’re filled with liquids that are free to slosh around”.
The Seetroën glasses have four liquid-filled rings that, thanks to gravity, simulate the angle and movements of the horizon so that the motions of the blue-dyed liquids seen by the wearer’s eyes match what their inner ear is detecting.
Thankfully, Citroën says, passengers don’t need to wear the Seetroën glasses for their entire trip. Once they put them on and stare at an unmoving object, such as a smartphone or a book, it takes about 10 to 12 minutes for the brain to resolve its feeling of confusion and nausea. For roughly 95 per cent of the population, that should be all that’s needed to eliminate motion sickness until the next time they climb into a vehicle.
Citroën will be selling its Seetroën glasses via its online lifestyle store for €99 ($156), which is considerably more expensive than a handful of ginger pills that won’t have other people on your flight pointing, snickering, and sharing covert photos of your bizarre spectacle choices on Twitter.