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IEEE's Spectrum has a piece on the opportunities and challenges of augmented reality.
You know your cellphone can distract you and that you shouldn’t be texting or surfing the Web while walking down a crowded street or driving a car. Augmented reality—in the form of Google Glass, Sony’s SmartEyeglass, or Microsoft HoloLens—may appear to solve that problem. These devices present contextual information transparently or in a way that obscures little, seemingly letting you navigate the world safely, in the same way head-up displays enable fighter pilots to maintain situational awareness. • But can augmented reality really deliver on that promise? We ask this question because, as researchers at Kaiser Permanente concerned with diseases that impair mobility (Sabelman) and with using technology to improve patient care (Lam), we see dangers looming. • With augmented-reality gear barely on the market, rigorous studies of its effects on vision and mobility have yet to be done. But in reviewing the existing research on the way people perceive and interact with the world around them, we found a number of reasons to be concerned. Augmented reality can cause you to misjudge the speed of oncoming cars, underestimate your reaction time, and unintentionally ignore the hazards of navigating in the real world. And the worst thing about it: Until something bad happens, you won’t know you’re at greater risk of harm.
I've always wanted a HUD with facial recognition and basic info about people whose names I should remember but don't.
Original Submission
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Gravis on Tuesday July 07 2015, @06:46PM
the problem is not that you have to look away or reach in your pocket, the problem is that the conscious mind only handles one task at a time. what we call "multitasking" is really just changing your focus in rapid succession. your brain doesn't work faster to keep up with the workload, it just does everything half as well. the reality is that the unconscious mind does almost all the work for us, so when we neglect our own mental authority we end up brazenly making mistakes.
(Score: 2) by curunir_wolf on Tuesday July 07 2015, @11:36PM
I am a crackpot
(Score: 3, Interesting) by darkfeline on Tuesday July 07 2015, @11:50PM
What you say is mostly true, but through extensive personal testing, I've found that conditional multitasking is possible. Specifically, your brain can handle two tasks at once as long as those two tasks don't require the same mental facilities.
One example is knitting and watching a video. Knitting requires repetitive manual action and minimal visual attention, while watching a video requires language/meaning processing, hearing, and some visual attention (note that extremely action- or visual-heavy videos will conflict with the visual attention needed for knitting). Listening to an audiobook and watching a video, however, is a no-no; they both require language/meaning processing. Listening to music and reading a book can be done simultaneously, but if you are listening to songs, you cannot listen to the words because that would conflict with the language processing needed for reading.
Now, on topic, there are some tasks that can be done while you are driving. Drinking and eating can work if you don't need to focus on getting them to your mouth, so have someone else feed you or put a tube in your mouth. Talking or hands-free calling can work so long as the topic of the conversation doesn't steal analytical facilities away from the driving task.
With regard to augmented reality and, e.g., driving, as long as it presents information that doesn't require interaction, it should be safe. The danger is that displaying an important text message on your windshield will FORCE mental interaction, especially for the weak-willed (namely, those who don't have the willpower to resist checking their smartphones/Facebook every ten seconds).
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(Score: 3, Touché) by Gravis on Wednesday July 08 2015, @05:15AM
What you say is mostly true, but through extensive personal testing, I've found that conditional multitasking is possible.
well i guess you should go tell the neuroscience community that they are wrong because you said so.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday July 08 2015, @06:13PM
One example is knitting and watching a video.
Is it really multi-tasking if you are just offloading the processing to your reptile brain co-processor (e.g. muscle memory)?