TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - A study published on the Journal of American Medical Association reveals drawback of wearing Google Glass. The head-mounted device may obstruct a person's vision more than wearing regular glasses, researchers say.

The device partly blocks a person's peripheral vision that is better in detecting motion than a person’s central vision.

“So during activities such as driving or even walking in the street, unobstructed peripheral vision is essential for spotting things out of the corner of one's eyes,” Livescience reported.

The study led by Dr. Tsontcho Ianchulev examined how much Google Glass, which has a prism and a larger frame than most conventional eyeglasses, affects a person’s peripheral vision by studying three participants.

The participants wore the device in three slightly different ways, so that the prism would sit either right in front of the eye's pupil (the dark area in the middle of the iris), or near the pupil, or a little above the level of the eye. The display feature of the eyewear — which can show a user information such as the weather, or phone calls they've received — was turned off during the experiment to avoid distractions.

To get a larger sample, the researchers also looked online for photographs of people wearing Google Glass, and analyzed 132 such images. They found that in about 40 percent of cases, the prism was placed above the pupil, but in 60 percent of the cases the prism was near to or covered the pupil.

The results suggest that many people wear the device in a position that's likely to cause blind spots and interfere with their daily activities.

AMRI MAHBUB | LIVE SCIENCE