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posted by janrinok on Sunday March 02 2014, @01:30AM   Printer-friendly
from the now-you-see-it,-now-you-don't dept.

Rich26189 writes:

"In a somewhat pre-emptive move Google is lobbying against state legislation that would ban drivers from using Google Glass while driving. I, for one, would like to see such legislation passed. There is enough distracted driving due to hand-held cell phones and Google Glass would just be just one more task for the brain to cope with.

This from Reuters:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/25/us-googl e-glass-lobbying-idUSBREA1O0P920140225"

 
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  • (Score: 1, Flamebait) by Angry Jesus on Sunday March 02 2014, @12:03PM

    by Angry Jesus (182) on Sunday March 02 2014, @12:03PM (#9542)

    I can't fathom how you can acknowledge that a phone conversation is a distraction yet fail to understand that reading text messages is just as distracting if not more so.

    Here's how -- when you are on the phone the other person doesn't know when to shut up when road conditions become dangerous. Reading a text message is something you can stop doing immediately when road conditions become dangerous and because reading the text message does not require you to take your eyes off the road or even change focus (unlike looking down at your dashboard) - it isn't significantly different from reading a road sign.

    But the main point I want to make is that a HUD needs to be integrated into your moving vehicle so that it is in the proper place(s) to never get in the way of your field of view and never be distracting you when you're trying to look at something else either in or outside the vehicle. It needs to not move.

      I'd sure like to see what information you base that claim on because it seems like various militaries disagree. [wikipedia.org]

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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by RedBear on Monday March 03 2014, @01:37AM

    by RedBear (1734) on Monday March 03 2014, @01:37AM (#9858)

    Military helmet mounted displays are still very much integrated into and designed for the specific vehicle you are driving, and show the pilot only what they need to see in order to effectively operate that vehicle for its designed task. Show me the military HUD or HMD that has integrated consumer Twitter and text messaging feeds. And the bulk of of the information the vehicle is giving the pilot is going to be in a non-moving dashboard or stationary HUD. What's in the military HMD is limited to very specific information like targeting information for a turret cannon. What a military HMD is showing a pilot bears very little resemblance to what Google Glass may be displaying to distract a driver.

    You fail to understand that if you are distracted by something you WON'T NOTICE when driving conditions become dangerous. That is why you are a dangerous driver. Whether it's a phone call or a text message that's distracting you doesn't much matter. I'm not talking about what's in your sight-line, I'm talking about what your BRAIN is doing, and how easy it is to keep your brain focused on the road traffic. It doesn't matter if your text messages are in a transparent HUD that lets you keep looking toward traffic, if you ever actually read that text message your brain is no longer watching traffic even if your eyes are still pointed in that general direction. For a few seconds while you read that message your brain is busy reading and interpreting text, not looking at and interpreting the road situation. Humans _cannot_ multi-task. We can only pretend to multi-task and fool ourselves into believing that we are successfully multi-tasking. Objective testing shows that we are extremely bad at actually doing true multi-tasking. You're either doing one thing with your brain's full attention, or you're doing another thing.

    I know that you and pretty much every other driver on the road _feel_ like you're an amazing driver and that you aren't significantly distracted by such things as phone calls and text messages and fiddling with your GPS map, but go take an actual objectively measured driving test while doing those things on your HUD or HMD and you will soon realize that you are a fool and a dangerous driver. If your BRAIN isn't actively paying complete attention to driving the vehicle and watching traffic, your reaction times are significantly increased, and the difference between life and death where moving vehicles are concerned is fractions of a second.

    Any device like Google Glass that is going to randomly show you things that are unrelated to driving, like text messages, is just straight up a horrible idea, especially when it's always in your field of view no matter where you're looking. But I guess since most of the drivers on the road are like you and think fiddling with Google Glass and reading text messages while driving is fine, the only real solution is to make all cars smart enough to compensate for the average driver's stupidity and distraction. So, looks like the roads are going to get more and more dangerous over the next couple of decades until the cars are truly smart enough to drive better than people. Getting the drivers to actually pay attention to driving seems like a losing battle, as your response confirms.

    Everybody is an amazing multi-tasking driver and text messages aren't distracting. Right. Whatever.

    --
    ¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
    ... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
    • (Score: 2) by Angry Jesus on Tuesday March 04 2014, @01:29AM

      by Angry Jesus (182) on Tuesday March 04 2014, @01:29AM (#10387)

      Man you are all over the place with your sanctimonious rant. You make a claim that "HUDS ... need to not move," you call it your main point even, and when it is completely disproven you just spew out anything that comes to mind. I don't have the patience to run down each and every bullshit claim you've made this time. So I'll pick the highlights and ignore as much of the self-righteous insults as possible:

      What's in the military HMD is limited to very specific information like targeting information for a turret cannon.

      You've confused a lack of capability as a design goal. That was once true, but only because older HMD's couldn't handle the entire job. Now they can. See the F-35 where the HMD fully replaces all HUD functionality, including navigation, landing and aircraft management under all flight regimes. [defencetalk.com]

      [You] _feel_ like you're an amazing driver and that you aren't significantly distracted by such things as phone calls and text messages and fiddling with your GPS map, but ... If your BRAIN isn't actively paying complete attention to driving the vehicle and watching traffic, your reaction times are significantly increased, and the difference between life and death where moving vehicles are concerned is fractions of a second.

      If the real world worked like that, the driver's seat would be in its own compartment completely isolated from the rest of the cabin. No speaker-phone. No radio to sing along with or yell at. No passengers to talk to you or piss you off by fighting with each other in the back-seat. No billboards or signs. No bumper stickers.

      But that's not the way the real world works. It's a trade off because there is a margin of safety and spending some of that margin on other things is of more utility. And as these things go, checking your instrumentation, reading text messages, getting GPS driving directions, etc all in a way doesn't take your eyes of the road, doesn't even require that you re-focus your eyes and is under your direct control, not "random," is something that is very likely going to be a net increase to that margin of safety than we have today.

      Furthermore, despite the enormous increase in cell phone and gps use in recent years, traffic fatality rates have declined more than 20% and injury rates are down more than 32% since 2000. [dot.gov]

      • (Score: 1) by RedBear on Tuesday March 04 2014, @08:46PM

        by RedBear (1734) on Tuesday March 04 2014, @08:46PM (#10943)

        I really shouldn't reply to this and the thread is so old you'll probably never see my reply anyway, but it's going to bug me until I do. The fact that you refer to my part of this discussion as "sanctimonious" certainly reconfirms my opinion of your viewpoint.

        First off, you'll notice when I said "main point" when replying to the original poster it was because my first paragraph in that reply was kind of on a tangent to what I mainly wanted to say in my reply to him, namely that between Google Glass and a stationary dashboard in a CONSUMER VEHICLE DRIVEN IN TRAFFIC ON PUBLIC ROADS the much preferable choice would be a stationary dashboard (i.e. "HUD" as he was referring to his Google Glass). Choosing when to take in information from a stationary dashboard which will only ever be displaying information relevant to driving the vehicle is far superior to having a head-mounted display that will show you things, at random times, completely unrelated to the safe driving of the vehicle.

        When I say "random", I mean that you have no control over when such notifications will be sent to you. You may choose when to actively read them, but you can't choose when they arrive at your device. I'm not sure how this was misunderstood. I know you think you are immune to the distraction of text messages, but can you really believe you won't be distracted for several seconds when your Google Glass pops up a message saying your wife was critically injured in a car accident across town? If that happens at the wrong time, instead of narrowly avoiding the stupid kid who just ran into the street in front of your car you'll go ahead and plow him down without noticing.

        Secondly, I don't feel the constant comparison to custom-designed military HUDs and HMDs makes any sense. I tried to imply this indirectly with previous comments already. Driving a consumer vehicle on public roads among pedestrians and bumper-to-bumper city/freeway traffic cannot be compared to piloting tanks, helicopters and jets which mainly occurs on wide open training ranges or battlefields that have already been cleared of most non-military personnel.

        I will grant you the full HUD in a HMD in a military vehicle, but I continue to reject the overall comparison as I did before. The display is still specifically designed to show the pilot only what they need for piloting that vehicle, they are specifically trained for many hours to pilot that vehicle using that specific HMD, and again I am certain there is no military HMD in existence that has an integrated Twitter/SMS feed to let the pilot's civilian buddies send him text messages. Because that would be idiocy of the highest order.

        Commercial jet pilots have plenty of time to drink some coffee and read the newspaper while they're on auto-pilot at cruising altitude, with no other planes within miles and the ground three miles below. But would you really want that airline pilot to be wearing his personal Google Glass type device while landing the plane? Think about it. With public road traffic in consumer vehicles, we are ALWAYS "LANDING THE PLANE". An airplane at cruising altitude can fall two miles out of the sky and still end up fine in many circumstances. If you fail to see the car ahead of you slam on the brakes at highway speeds you are dead. Many people drive in such circumstances for an hour or more every damn day!

        Thirdly, if we actually cared that much about traffic safety we would indeed isolate the driver from all distractions. But as you say, there is a practical balance between cost and what drivers are willing to put up with. But that isn't saying much. After all, the entire auto industry and nearly every driver on the road rejected the very idea of something as simple and inexpensive as seat belts for decades. Now they are standard and required by law nearly everywhere. I do not buy that checking instrumentation now and then is anywhere on the same level as reading text messages, and reading text messages has nothing to do with driving the vehicle. I'm also not sure how you believe you can read a text message on a HUD without refocusing your eyes (and more importantly BRAIN) away from traffic. That's some magical HUD.

        Lastly, even if you can point to traffic statistics showing that the remaining accidents weren't often caused by distractions like texting on phones, that proves nothing regarding something brand new and even more invasive like Google Glass which has only been in the hands of relatively few people for a couple of years. Again, take an objective driving test while being distracted by something like Google Glass and see just how wrong you are about how great a safety tradeoff it is to use such things in traffic, even at low speeds.

        My sister was rear-ended pretty good in a turning lane many years ago by some idiot who was just messing with his radio, before texting was even really a thing. Unless you have a copilot to take care of such things, it is my strongly held opinion that all such distractions should be minimized and a driver has no business taking their eyes AND ATTENTION off the road for more than a half-second even if they are on a completely empty road. Reading text messages takes far longer than that, and as everyone gets addicted to needing such constant interactions even while driving and exponentially more messages are sent it becomes statistically more and more likely that they will cause just enough distraction at the wrong moments to cause a statistically meaningful number of accidents that otherwise could have been avoided. I do not consider allowing the reading of texts and tweets while driving to be an acceptable safety tradeoff. Period.

        I'm sure a lot of this post will be seen as some kind of moving of goalposts, but I have been consistent with my own viewpoint at all times, even if I didn't successfully communicate that viewpoint from the beginning in a way that you understood. I'll try better next time.

        If you're important enough to be texting and making phone calls while driving, then you're obviously important enough to have a chauffeur to drive you while you text and make phone calls. Otherwise get the hell off the road and do such things only when safely parked out of traffic. When you drive a car, you should be DRIVING THE CAR. That is my opinion and I will never be dissuaded from it.

        • (Score: 2) by Angry Jesus on Tuesday March 04 2014, @10:21PM

          by Angry Jesus (182) on Tuesday March 04 2014, @10:21PM (#11018)

          When I say "random", I mean that you have no control over when such notifications will be sent to you. You may choose when to actively read them, but you can't choose when they arrive at your device. I'm not sure how this was misunderstood.

          You wrote "randomly displayed" that's how you were 'misunderstood.'

          Your intellectual dishonesty is waaaaay too tedious to even bother reading past that.