WASHINGTON – Google Glass, the tiny, Internet-connected eyewear, may have a blind spot that partially obstructs peripheral vision, according to a study in the Nov. 5 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association.
The study, conducted on only three people, used a standard test to compare vision while wearing standard eyeglasses to Google Glass.
While wearing the optical head-mounted Glass device, the user positions a small prism-like lens above the right eye, slightly out of the normal line of sight.
Glass wearers can snap pictures with voice commands or tapping the frame — even blinking purposefully — and project images or data that can be seen without having to look down at a smartphone or tablet.
Yet, according to the study, led by Tsontcho Ianchulev, an ophthalmologist and professor at University of California, San Francisco, all three participants wearing Glass had “a clinically meaningful visual field obstruction in the upper right quadrant.”
The test didn’t even consider whether the problem was caused by a person trying to multitask while operating Glass — the device was turned off.
“Defects were inducted by the Google Glass frame hardware design only and were not related to a distracting effect of software-related interference,” the report says, quoted in Science Daily.
Google has conducted several of its own tests about how peripheral vision is affected by the device.
One of Google’s consultants, Dr. Eli Peli, recently posted that when one eye is partially obstructed, the other eye compensates.
Google has not released a lower-priced consumer model at this point. Glass was first sold to a small number of “explorers” in April 2013, and costs $1,500.
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