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Study Suggests That HUD Tech May Actually Reduce Driving Safety
Zothecula writes: Having a heads-up display constantly feed you information while cruising down the road may make you feel like a jet pilot ready to avoid any potential danger but recent findings suggest otherwise. Studies done at the University of Toronto show that the HUD multi-tasking method of driving a vehicle is dangerous. "Drivers need to divide their attention to deal with this added visual information," said Department of Psychology professor Ian Spence, who led the research. "Not only will drivers have to concentrate on what’s happening on the road around them as they’ve always done, they’ll also have to attend to whatever warning pops up on the windshield in front of them."
Similar statements could be made for desktops, where tray icon pop-ups for updates, email and chat notifications distract and interrupt workflows.
This. This is why when I want to get work done and not get distracted I shut down Outlook, IM, my browser and any other thing that might distract me. The difference is if I get distracted on my PC, I get distracted. If I get distracted in my car people could die.
A big popup interface on the windscreen is going to serve as a fantastic distraction. Especially as it's primary use is going to be Facebook, Twitter and so forth. People who are already terrible drivers will be staring right at the back of the car as they plough into it because their brain wont even register that the car is coming closer as their too distracted reading the latest tweet about gluten free mittens or some such.
As such, I'm filing this study under N for "No shit".
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Extra information is bad. Information that you would have been taking eyes off the road to see anyway is more safely presented in a HUD.
What the study found is that having the nifty display is an invitation to push more information to the driver than they previously were processing.
When the dangers of driving while holding a cell phone became clear, many places banned hand-held cellphones while driving but allowed hands-free cell phones. After further research, it seems clear that hand-free cell phones aren't any safer. Even a little distraction can be very dangerous when you need quick reflexes. Minor distractions are particularly dangerous because most of the time you don't need quick reflexes; you're just cruising down the highway -- lulling you into a false sense of security. I'm guessing a HUD causes similar problems.
And wait for your night vision to get completely turned to ass when they start introducing these HUDs in different colors as a fashion statement. Anything other than red - you're much more likely to crash at night because your night vision is being fucked with.
No, there is substantial debate on this subject still. There are two camps: red light does not affect your night vision, and blue light helps you stay awake. Actually, night vision is regularly impaired while driving anyway, so that's a dumb argument. Get a car with good headlights, use them.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Precisely. A friend of mine worked on the first heads up displays for NASA. He painstakingly measured how much information an astronaut/jet pilot could pay attention to at once, and react to within a certain time frame. The same sort of design needs to go into cars' HUD's. My car has a full time HUD showing speed, very unobtrusively. I no longer need to move my eyes from the road to see my speed. Same for when I use the car's GPS, and have a trip showing. I don't have to remove my eyes to look at the map, I simply can look at a very small arrow below the speed as I near a turn, and it says how many tenths of a mile until that turn. An audio signal notifies me, so I don't need to divert my eyes to the lower portion of the windshield. If done well, a HUD adds to safety.
My new car has exactly that feature. If a car ahead of me stops abruptly, it flashes a red car on the HUD well in advance. The timing is the key, the couple of times it has happened, the car "saw" the obstacle VERY early, giving me plenty of time to stop. It happens very rarely, such that if that warning is up, you know it's important to be alert. It's pretty intuitive and really doesn't distract as it's complementary to what I've hopefully already been looking at. It's also small and low in your field of view, so it doesn't block your view of traffic. The car will also apply the brakes itself to avoid a crash.
TFA shows a red car with a green arrow directing the driver to go around. I can definitely see how that might be too much in an emergency situation, particularly if you aren't trained on how to interpret and respond to that alert. My "red car icon" is more of a "HEY! WAKE UP!" and mostly leaves the avoidance decisions up to me. I could see more complex HUD alerts like in the TFA also being beneficial, but requiring training, so less time is needed to understand and react to the alert.
I don't think TFA's controlled tests are representative enough of how mature drivers drive. We practically drive on auto-pilot most of the time. The alerts are really helpful at getting you to focus when you need to, if your mind wanders a bit because you're making the same drive you've driven hundreds times before.