The truth about driving under the influence of Google Glass

drove from Los Angeles to San Francisco while wearing Google Glass, and I did not get into an accident.

That's the first thing you should know about using Glass while driving. The second thing you should know is this: It's absolutely safer driving with Glass than picking up your phone and looking down -- something that we know we're not supposed to do, but the vast majority of us do anyway.

The Verge wrote a brief review of using Glass while driving, but it wasn't a sufficiently long or thorough test, in my opinion. So I decided to drive under the influence of Glass across Los Angeles for a weekend and wear it on my return trip to San Francisco.

Glass isn't a device that keeps interrupting your day. When you get notifications, it plays a distinctive tone, but you have to either touch your Glass or tilt your head up and down to view the notification. While I was driving, I tried not to look at these notifications until I was parked at a stoplight (though sometimes curiosity got the best of me). You absolutely need to adjust the head-tilt settings so you don't keep activating Glass whenever you hit a bump. (Mine is set for 21 degrees.)

While bright sunlight can make it hard to view your Glass screen, the sunglasses extension is very useful at countering this effect. Unlike The Verge's Sean Hollister, I had no problem discerning the majority of the Glass notifications in the bright sun of L.A. (Path posts were hard to read, though.) The bone conduction speaker has trouble getting over the sounds of traffic and engines, but I could make out the majority of what Glass read to me.