Looking silly isn’t the only drawback to wearing Google Glass: A small new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggests that the wearable computer can block part of your peripheral vision.
Researchers tested the visual fields of three people while they wore Glass and then again as they donned a pair of control frames. The result: Glass left study participants with blind spots on their right sides, while control frames did not.
That’s because the hardware on Google Glass wraps around the right side of the frames, where it can obstruct your view, says study author Tsontcho Ianchulev, M.D., an associate clinical professor of ophthalmology at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Ianchulev and his team also analyzed more than 300 photos of people wearing Glass and estimated that 59 percent would likely have a blind spot.
The severity of the obstruction could differ from person to person. “People have different heads—small heads, big heads, different distances between their eyes—so depending on the variation of those, some people can have a much bigger blind spot or a much smaller blind spot,” says Dr. Ianchulev.
Any visual obstruction can be potentially dangerous, says Dr. Ianchulev. For example, blind spots might increase your risk of tripping and falling or ending up in a car accident. And when you turn the glasses on and add the distraction of checking e-mail and doing other tasks, would it make the problem even worse? That’s something the researchers are hoping to learn in a future study.
Still, that doesn’t mean you have to write off the gadget, which we reviewed last year. (“Is There Space on Your Face for Glass?”) “Google has done a phenomenal job at really packing so much power and electronics into a small device and making it extremely useful for many applications,” says Dr. Ianchulev. Just exercise caution: “What we are saying is that maybe driving with it, or biking with it, or riding a motorcycle is probably not the best idea, and we want people to be aware of that before they undertake those activities with the device,” he says.
He’s also optimistic that future iterations of Google Glass might be kinder to your peepers. “This is not a problem that cannot be solved with a little bit of engineering and modification of the frame,” he says.
