Driving While Interacting With Google Glass: Investigating the Combined Effect of Head-Up Display and Hands-Free Input on Driving Safety and Multitask Performance

Objective: This study evaluated the individual and combined effects of voice (vs. manual) input and head-up (vs. head-down) display in a driving and device interaction task. Background: Advances in wearable technology offer new possibilities for in-vehicle interaction but also present new challenges for managing driver attention and regulating device usage in vehicles. This research investigated how driving performance is affected by interface characteristics of devices used for concurrent secondary tasks. A positive impact on driving performance was expected when devices included voice-to-text functionality (reducing demand for visual and manual resources) and a head-up display (HUD) (supporting greater visibility of the driving environment). Method: Driver behavior and performance was compared in a texting-while-driving task set during a driving simulation. The texting task was completed with and without voice-to-text using a smartphone and with voice-to-text using Google Glass’s HUD. Results: Driving task performance degraded with the addition of the secondary texting task. However, voice-to-text input supported relatively better performance in both driving and texting tasks compared to using manual entry. HUD functionality further improved driving performance compared to conditions using a smartphone and often was not significantly worse than performance without the texting task. Conclusion: This study suggests that despite the performance costs of texting-while-driving, voice input methods improve performance over manual entry, and head-up displays may further extend those performance benefits. Application: This study can inform designers and potential users of wearable technologies as well as policymakers tasked with regulating the use of these technologies while driving.