Google Glass Makes It Hard to See, Science Finds

It's unclear to me whether Google Glass is still A Thing, much less a thing that real people and not just Startup Cyborgs actually want to wear. Nonetheless, it's probably worth letting you know that, if you wear Google's face computer, you are physically unable to see a clinically relevant part of the Real World™.

A new study published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that three participants who wore Google Glass had their peripheral field of vision significantly lowered.

This reduction isn't at all related to augmented reality or the checking of emails or whatever people do with Google Glass. It is simply associated with the fact that you have that big chunk of plastic on the right side of your face. The Glass' "screen" or prism is believed to be the main culprit.

"The device created a clinically meaningful visual field obstruction in the upper right quadrant," the researchers, from the University of California, San Francisco wrote. "Defects were induced by the frame hardware design only and were not related to a distracting effect of software-related interference."

According to the researchers, "more than 10 degrees of visual field in the horizontal axis were subtended" while wearing the device.

Besides doing visual tests with three different subjects (not a huge sample size, obviously, but this was something of a mini-study), the researchers took a look at 311 images of people wearing Google Glass and found that roughly 60 percent of them had the glasses positioned in a way in which they were likely to have significant visual field reduction.

I know what you're thinking, all five people who are still enthused and excited by Google Glass, and you've got a point: Yes, this is just peripheral vision, a field of view that is certainly the least important to the self-absorbed.