[moistgorilla]

Seriously? How would this be more dangerous than current cellphones? At least with glass you can keep your eyes facing the road while gathering information and I'm pretty sure you don't need your hand to answer phone calls either (tilt your head.).

Also, they wouldn't be releasing a product that caused eye problems.

[lloeki]

> At least with glass you can keep your eyes facing the road

A sheet of anything, however transparent, centimetres away from your eye won't help you see something a hundred meters away.

You're concerned with alignment but focus matters even more. You usually don't notice the focus time because your eyes are doing it while moving (changing the alignment).

HUDs work in planes and cars because they're far away enough to be in the "far sight" range.

Worse, while once your eye moved the distracting elements are out of the way and you get an unobstructed and non-distractive view, with this you simply can't look away of the distracting elements — merely focus away — and however transparent and blurry it would appear it would still obscure the view.

Besides, the attention problem makes it an order of magnitude more likely to have an accident whereas the hands problem makes it only a factor more. When you're on a call with someone or whatever, hands or not, your mind is simply not driving.

So, should it be a cause of concern? I don't know, but it's certainly not the solution. Driving is an enjoyable yet serious matter, requiring a combination of motor and cognitive skills, therefore the solution is (whether people like it or not) that one should not do anything else but driving, or not drive at all (i.e have someone either drive meanwhile or do the task, or take the train, coach, taxi, or get a Google car). The huge majority of crashes are directly tied to an inadequate level of cognition from the driver (alcohol, testosterone excess, adrenaline addiction, sleep deprivation, psychological pressure, multitasking...) because every dent one makes in its ability to analyse raises the odds of an event ranging from nuisance to dramatic given the energies involved WRT our frail physical envelopes.

So, drive responsibly. Don't answer, dial or text wile driving, and don't put an electronic lid on your eye. Even if you think it's safe while it's probably not, it's way safer not to.

[Cogito]

Just to make sure I'm not misunderstanding you, you're saying that having a display in front of your eyes would distract you from other things, for example the road?

Surely in cases where this is important you can simply turn off the display? A piece of glass or plastic isn't going to interrupt anyone's vision, as we can see by everyone who wears glasses when driving.

Furthermore, I don't agree that any loss of optical clarity is "way" more dangerous than perfect vision, nor that something being displayed on the glasses need be perceptible at all.

For example, if a glasses wearing driver were to swap out their moderately rimmed glasses for fancy clear-framed glasses, their safety would be inpercievably improved. At times, it is easy to not notice dust on your glasses.

Now, there is certainly potential for far more obstruction to be had, and the case for changing focus is surely one to be considered, however the claim that it is necessarily "way safer" to not have anything present close to your eye that is not completely transparent is incorrect. As a simple counterexample, the glasses could change tint or brightness according to driving conditions, improving the vision of the driver. Drivers already do this by putting sunglasses on, these glasses could do it automatically.

[lloeki]

I'm talking about the display being enabled (else it would simply be similar to regular glasses) bringing two problems:

- the sight problem: both eyes converge and focus simultaneously (unless you have some serious neurologic issue). Unless Google solved the problem of measuring the the lens curvature (i.e eye focal distance) and send light rays the proper way in a ridiculously tiny and cheap package (compared to currently available professional equipment measuring such values), it is sending them in a best-effort way on a fixed focale. Hence the display will look blurred for some focal distances (possibly obscuring all of part of the field of view in a significant manner), while when at the correct focal distance change of focus takes time (possibly preventing to see or notice stuff in a timely manner, or at all).

- the cognitive load problem: even simple notifications on your computer eats away your productivity, so imagine the firehose of your digital life randomly pinging you while driving.

The first one is a general concern covering many areas (safety, health, comfort...) while the second one is making a point that it does not bring anything to safety while driving.

[Shooti]

According to David Pogue of the NYT who tried them on back in September the display is "invisible" unless you focus on it:

"The biggest triumph — and to me, the biggest surprise — is that the tiny screen is completely invisible when you’re talking or driving or reading. You just forget about it completely. There’s nothing at all between your eyes and whatever, or whomever, you’re looking at.

And yet when you do focus on the screen, shifting your gaze up and to the right, that tiny half-inch display is surprisingly immersive. It’s as though you’re looking at a big laptop screen or something.

(Even though I usually need reading glasses for close-up material, this very close-up display seemed to float far enough away that I didn’t need them. Because, yeah — wearing glasses under Glass might look weird.)"

http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/13/google-glass-and-t...

[njharman]

> A sheet of anything, however transparent, centimetres away from your eye won't help you see something a hundred meters away.

My 20/600 vision and prescription glasses tend to disagree. See also, people throughout history FUDing new technology.

[Someone]

"At least with glass you can keep your eyes facing the road while gathering information"

But can you keep attending to the road? Fighter pilots can, but they take a lot of training, lots of them don't make it through training, and their display doesn't show 'I am contacting you on behalf of my deceased Nigerian aunt" messages.

For mere mortals, I think it may be safer to have separate gaze directions for 'looking at the road' and 'looking at my cellphone's screen', if that screen shows data unrelated to the driving task.