Google Glass May Be Banned In The UK, But You Can Bet We'll All Be Using It

Google Glass is like ground-effect F1 racing cars. Fun until they kill you? Well, perhaps. What I mean is they’re all seemingly game-changing inventions that’ve been stamped out by lawmakers before they had a chance to change the world. In the context of cars that can corner faster than a human can think, or a legal high that leads to extremely unsavourary behaviour, it’s the correct call. But banning one of mankind’s longest-chased fantasy inventions – augmented reality head-up display vision – while driving, seems a bloody shame. Or is it?

The UK’s Department for Transport, or Department for Spoilsport, as it should be known, has confirmed it’ll make Google Glass illegal to use while driving when the device goes on sale later in 2013. It’ll be classified under the same umbrella as talking on a mobile: i.e. it’s a distracting electronic device and you'll pay £60 and take three points on your license if caught.

And that’s my bone of contention with this whole ‘Google Glass causes crashes’ bonanza. We all still see people every day driving around the UK with their non-gearstick hand cradling a phone to their ear. Our phone calls, it would seem, are far more important than our money, driving licenses, and everyone’s safety – and that’s before you get onto the whole sorry business of drive-texting...

So if we can’t effectively stop people holding a talking brick while driving, how the hell do you police Google Glass? For a start, it’s already a pretty subtle piece of kit:

And don’t forget, this is the Mk1. This is the equivalent of the original 2001 iPod, which has gone from looking like this...

...to looking like this, while storing seven times the amount of data, plus playing videos, games, radio, showing photos, yadda yadda....

So in three years time, you can bet the next Google Glass with look less nerdy, and, when twinned with a suitably flashy pair of shades (tortoise-shell Ray Ban Wayfarers, naturally), it’ll be nigh-on impossible to spot when being worn behind the wheel.

And let’s put the brakes on for a second and look at what Google Glass actually does. Google’s own promo material suggests it’s the ultimate driving assistant, twinning real-time navigation with voice commands and traffic updates, all beamed directly to your eyeline. Sure, you have to refocus your vision away from the road to look at the display lurking in your peripheral vision, but surely that’s no more distracting than flicking your eyes to a windscreen-suckered TomTom? Only in the last three years or so have car manufacturers really cottoned on to the display line-of-sight idea, pushing screens up into floating tablet-like positions, more conveniently located for the driver. Mercedes, you’re doing it right:

And thumbs up to VW...

...and for Porsche, with the genius instrument display mini-nav...

..but until head-up displays become mandatory, and not just a novelty feature in BMW M3s and Corvettes, we still depend on oblong screens wedged into the cockpit.

Of course, the flipside is that, like mobile telephones, which do an awful lot more than simply allow you to talk to people with other telephones, Google Glass isn’t just a wearable sat-nav. It’s a web browser, a social-network fiend, and potentially, the most discreet way ever to watch movies, iPlayer, or the sort of sites that require an ‘R U 18?’ disclaimer and swift finger on the ‘mute’ key before you enter. And if drivers are watching The Rock or getting their rocks off while driving, that’s when Google Glass could become the most dangerous thing to enter a motor vehicle since Romain Grosjean.

Here’s the brass tacks of it all. I just don’t see it being policed effectively, unless Google engineers an algorithm which can shut down the Glass unit when it senses the owner is driving a car. But it’ll take jailbreaking hackers a grand total of fifteen minutes to sidestep that, so it’s hardly a solution. I also don’t think Google Glass is potentially any MORE distracting than using a phone, cycling through iDrive, or even having rowdy passengers in your car.

I won’t be buying Google Glass. I can’t afford one, I don’t have an urgent need for it, and I only switched from glasses to contact lenses four years ago. I’m damned if I’m taking a load more stick for nerdy eyewear, thanks. I like the idea of using it while cycling, but that’ll be illegal too, and biking is dangerous enough anyway, without being run down by a driver talking on a phone, or wearing a pair of electro-specs...

I don’t necessarily agree with the notion of using it while driving and I appreciate the drawbacks raised here – doubtless you’ll come up with more in the comments. But with no effective way to enforce a ban on the device, I think it’s about to enter the same realm as speeding, cheeky oversteer, and fooling around with your girlfriend as you drive. No, you really shouldn’t be doing it. But if you get the chance, you’re almost certainly going to.