You will soon control your iPhone or iPad with your eyes

Today Apple announced a new suite of accessibility features coming "later this year" to its iPhones and iPads, so presumably these will be part of iOS 18 and iPadOS 18, due to be officially unveiled next month.

By far the most interesting of the bunch is eye tracking, which will be supported on both iPhones and iPads, and will let you control the devices with your eyes, just like the name implies.

This is aimed at users with physical disabilities, but everyone will be able to use it. Eye tracking will be powered by AI (because everything has to be now). Initially you'll go through a seconds-long calibration phase which will happen through the front-facing camera, and then you'll be all good to go. All of the data used for this never leaves your device, as it's powered by on-device machine learning.

You won't need any additional hardware or accessories, and Eye tracking will work with every app. It will let you navigate through the elements of an app with your eyes, and use Dwell Control to activate each element by dwelling upon it with your eyes.

Next up, the Taptic engine in your iPhone will play taps, textures, and refined vibrations all tuned to the music you're listening to, and this reminds us of Sony's similar feature that debuted many, many years ago, except that Apple's Music Haptics only works with Apple Music initially. It will however be available as an API for developers to make music more engaging in their own apps, if they want to.

Most intriguingly, Apple has also announced Vehicle Motion Cues, a feature that's supposed to help reduce motion sickness for passengers who are in moving vehicles and are using their iPhone or iPad.

This will put some animated dots on the edges of the screen which will represent changes in vehicle motion, and this will somehow help alleviate motion sickness, though it's not explained exactly how, but we're looking forward to finding out more about this feature.

CarPlay is also getting Voice Control, which does exactly what the name implies, letting you navigate CarPlay and control apps with just your voice, Sound Recognition for people who are deaf or hard of hearing to be notified of car horns and sirens, and Color Filters for the colorblind.

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