IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Summer 2014 - 23

LEADING EDGE

ROBERT
ROSENBERGER

Google Glass and Highway
Safety-Messy Decisions

hen Cecilia Abadie - a Google Glass
"explorer" testing out the new device -
received the first ever traffic ticket in
October 2013 for using Glass while driving, many in the media wondered if a precedent had
been set. When Abadie's charges were dismissed in
January 2014 [7], again many wondered if this would
set a meaningful standard.
But so far only one thing is clear: on this issue, the
ice has been definitively broken. And the immediate
concerns are coming into focus. Do head-mounted
display devices like Glass pose a dangerous distraction to drivers? If so, what kind of a distraction is it?
And what should be done to address this danger?
We don't have the answers yet. The newness of this
technology means that we do not already have a body of
scientific findings. And as the Abadie verdict dramatizes,
current laws have failed to anticipate these developments.
But the good news is that there does exist a sprawling catalog of empirical data on an intimately related
topic: cell phone driver distraction. We can infer
many things from these findings, including the forms
that Glass-induced distractions may take, the pitfalls
ahead for regulation efforts, and even some new hazards these devices may bring to the road.

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2014.2319931
Date of publication: 4 June 2014

IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

SUMMER 2014

Cell Phone Distraction
A consensus has emerged in the empirical literature
on the sources of cell phone driver distraction. This
kind of driving impairment can involve any of three
factors: visual distraction (i.e., looking away from the
road); manual distraction (i.e., taking a hand off the
steering wheel); and cognitive distraction (i.e., taking your mind off the task of driving). This threepart understanding of driver distraction has become
influential enough, for example, to find its way into
official U.S. government literature (e.g., http://www.
distraction.gov/content/get-the-facts/index.html).
These three factors are also helpful for understanding
the driving impairment associated with texting, one
of the most distracting cell-phone-related activities
[5], [9]. For normal handheld texting, all three factors
of distraction may be involved. A texter takes a hand
off the wheel to type out a message, takes eyes off
the road to look down at the screen, and takes some
mental effort away from the task of driving and puts it
toward the tasks of reading and writing.
The central (and perhaps surprising) finding in
this body of empirical research is that hands-free and
handheld phone use are both associated with the same
dangerous drop in driving performance. (For reviews
of this preponderance of data, see [2], [6], [8]). This
means that the impairment of phone calls is due mainly
to only one of those three factors: cognitive distraction.
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http://www http://www.distraction.gov/content/get-the-facts/index.html

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Summer 2014