If you are ballsy enough to run around town sporting your Google Glass gear, hats off to you. Well you probably need to take your hat off to make sure it doesn’t obstruct your device, too. But you should know, your vision could be compromised.
A small new study suggests that the software is not an issue, but the structure of the glasses could curtail natural peripheral vision. As a result, blind spots could be created, which is definitely a problem.
“I am very pro new technology,” said Dr. Tsontcho Ianchulev, lead author of a research letter concerning Google Glass, and a clinical associate professor in the department of ophthalmology at University of California, San Francisco. “I’m an aficionado of anything new or novel, and I myself was an early adopter of Google Glass. But I almost got into a car accident when I was driving with it. And the device was even turned off at the time. So, that really alerted me to how much my peripheral vision seemed to be blocked by the frame,” he continued.
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“What we’ve done is test the glasses in a very simple low-budget way, using standard ophthalmology to compare it to regular eyewear,” Ianchulev said. “And we found that the frame of Google Glass cuts out a portion of your vision that prevents a user from seeing things on the right side of their visual field.”
Here’s how they did it: People with 20/20 corrected vision were given an hour to get comfy with Google Glass, and then after it was turned off, their standard peripheral vision was tested. Each participant in the study had “clinically meaningful” loss of vision in their upper right quadrant.
“This loss of peripheral vision due to the obstruction [of Google Glass frames] could be significant depending upon what the observer is doing while wearing the device,” Mark Rosenfield, a professor at the State University of New York College of Optometry in New York City said. “A subject who was driving, operating machinery or in motion could be severely, and dangerously, impacted by the visual field loss.”
[Photo of Robert Scoble from flickr user Thomas Hawk]
