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Lawmakers Seek To Ban Google Glass On the Road
An anonymous reader writes in with news about a West Virginia bill that would prohibit drivers from "using a wearable computer with head mounted display." Republican Gary G. Howell sponsored the bill in reaction to reading an article on Google Glass and said: "I actually like the idea of the product and I believe it is the future, but last legislature we worked long and hard on a no-texting-and-driving law. It is mostly the young that are the tech-savvy that try new things. They are also our most vulnerable and underskilled drivers. We heard of many crashes caused by texting and driving, most involving our youngest drivers. I see the Google Glass as an extension."
And if I want to use the GPS feature only while driving? I think the best solution would be for Google to add a "lockout" feature, where GPS is the only feature accessible when the speed of the glasses is in excess of some reasonable number. Users could enable or disable this mode, as I can with my normal GPS unit, for the cases where the device is being used by the passenger instead of the driver. Then it falls under a blanket "distracted driving" laws when used inappropriately but is still allowable when used appropriately.
- W. Blaine Dowler
http://www.bureau42.com
But technically I could run a app that is beneficial to my driving. This week end rented a car and got one with a HUD. It displayed three things, the speed limit, the current speed and the navigation instructions. It "floated" over the hood and I could read the information without taking my eyes off the street. This is VERY beneficial when you are currently doing a maneuver in heavy traffic. It also made the audio queues obsolete. (It had none.) Oh and this implementation of a speed limit indicator works, you see your speed and the speed limit all the time. You really have to willfully be speeding, you can't speed "by mistake".
The only thing the Google glasses need are a driving mode.
HUDs on cars currently are also less intrusive and only take up 5-10% of your viewing area. Google Glass will probably cause people to focus on the road differently just like when you hold your phone to your head it causes you to lose mental focus.
Or we could, you know, worry about actual behavior and actual problems instead of perceived imagined nonsense crap like this. I put texting and driving bans in the same category. Unless you also ban other things which are demonstrably as distracting as texting and driving, you're just a reactionary anti technology twerp who doesn't like something because it's popular with people you don't care for.
Nobody was worried about cell phones when they were so expensive as to only be business tools for certain well paid professions. It's only when young and less well off people adopted them that the Chicken Little screaming began. Meanwhile, we don't ban putting on makeup, shaving, reading printed material, and, worst of all, undisciplined children from cars. The latter, btw, being the direct cause of an accident which caused damage to my car while I was sitting still once. I didn't decide to make it my life's mission to do something about distractions caused by kids in cars, as some of these anti tech crusaders with too much time and too small brains seem to.
Driving like an idiot while looking at a paper map? That's ok. Do the same thing using a piece of tech to find your way? You need to be arrested or fined because you're a hazard. Please note the hazard is the same either way, it's just what some fools feel about the cause that's different. Yes, I meant "feel" and not "think" because clearly there's no thinking going on.
BTW, not a young person with an axe to grind. Just somebody who's spent too long watching useless overreactions to things time and again. Although it was before just about anybody's time here, I'm told this same stupid debate came up when they first started putting radios in cars. Ponder that for a while. Then ponder the notion that we do absolutely nothing about training and teaching people how to deal with the stuff in their cars. We don't make it illegal for bosses to fire people who aren't available every second of every day. We don't study the extra hazard caused by exiting and reentering the road because some law says you have to in order to make a call. We do nothing that might actually help, and we just pass more dumb laws.