Slashdot Mirror
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."
IF you have some kind of info 'popping up', there's your problem there. Show speed. Show specific information. Do not constantly CHANGE that information to make drivers deal with new data.
Similar statements could be made for desktops, where tray icon pop-ups for updates, email and chat notifications distract and interrupt workflows.
Maybe both for desktops and cars, this problem can be solved by detecting whether the user is currently focussed (on the road or a task) or relaxed/idle, and may be interrupted. Mylyn is a very impressive demo of thinking in this direction, I would like to see more of it.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
My wife's 'vette has a hud in it and the first thing I do when I drive the car is turn the hud off. When flying the best advice is to keep your head 'out of the cockpit', in other words scanning the skies around you. New pilots' are always glued to the instruments, mature pilots eyes are focused outside except for quick scans of the instruments.
They asked the people to report a box showing up? That isn't normal when driving, therefor the test its self might be distracting.
HUD displays should only be used to display info that is normally checked anyway like the speedometer as well as things like the new IR cameras that can detect deer near the side of the road which will be invisible. Having displays pop up some virtual brake lights on a stopped or slowing down car is fine but it has to be done right. It took aviation decades to get the basics for instruments right. The stuff that looks cool on a HUD demo in an office isn't what will work best in cars on a dark foggy road.
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.
Who would have thought that distracting drivers with information would make them less safe as drivers?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
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.'"
Mod parent up.
Even the multi-function displays in the middle of the instrument panels on *all* cars made in the last three or four years is too much. Old fogeys like myself, at the crusty old age of 29, have gotten used to associating a particular spatial location in an automobile's console with a particular piece of information so that it's second nature.
This is how the mind is wired to absorb information from the world at a very basic level. Want to see what the weather it is? Look up. Want to see if you're walking on steady ground? Look down. Want to see if there's danger or prey out there? Look around.
Same in a car, or fighter jet for that matter: Want to see the time? Look at where the clock is. Want to see what radio station you're listening to? Look at where the tuner is. Want to see how much gas you've got? Look at where the fuel gauge is. This is constant-time lookup. If you have multifunction displays that *change* where these basic things are, now you've upped the cognitive load on the driver in that he now has to keep track of what state the display is in rather than just glancing in a well-remembered spot.
A proper heads-up display, and a proper desktop GUI, smartphone app, etc, preserve this feature so that you can see what you need by looking where you remember. Incidentally, this is a large part of what 'type rating' is on commercial aircraft, and aircraft manufacturers frequently retain large commercial customers by laying out the cockpits of their newer models the same exact way as the old one, with the selling point that pilots don't need to be retrained to figure out where they need to be looking and where their hands need to be in the new cockpit.
The point is, a good HUD for a car will show the same thing in the same place all the time. Just projections of dials and needles if I had my way. No popups, no text to read, no nothing. If there's something wrong with the car, a single idiot light that says 'check engine' will do it, because you're not going to diagnose it yourself while on the highway. That way it actually does save you time and keeps your gaze closer to the road.
But yeah. If you've got bells and whistles and distractions in your field of vision, of course it's unsafe. Most people are probably smart enough to ignore the popup message crap polluting automotive mutlifunction displays, by keeping their eyes up. If the crap follows them there, that's not an usafe display mechanism, that's unsafe human interface design. </rant>
The difference is that a fighter pilot has been selected for their skills, esp. with multi-tasking and processing a rapidly evolving environment. Few candidates actually make it past the starting gate. Drivers on the other hand are only weeded down to those that can stay in a lane, use a turn signal, and apply the brakes at an intersection. You can be an almost entirely incompetent driver and pass your exam. If you fail you can generally can continue to retake the test until you pass. Eventually the dice will land just right.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
He painstakingly measured how much information an astronaut/jet pilot could pay attention to at once, and react to within a certain time frame.
Aviation folks have an awesome term for when pilots freeze from information overload. They call it having a helmet fire which to this day cracks me up and is a perfect term for the problem.