This concern does not seem to have deterred air forces from putting head-up-displays in front of pilots. The primary goal of a HUD in a cockpit is to keep you from needing to go head-down and lose any chance of seeing something important happening outside the cockpit. Better to have something small momentarily obscured than have you looking away completely. That said, I'm not sure motorcyclists have a constant need to perform instrument scans that take them head-down in the first place. I'd be wary of the urge to put too much information up on the display just because it looks cool, or because you can...

Actually, I've talked quite a bit with folks who were at NASA an building next generation heads up displays that were 'constant field of view', their conclusion (and they design stuff for Attack Helicopter pilots) was that the display has to put things into the environment rather than having it display static things, this allows the pilot to look at the environment rather than look at the display.

An example of how that worked in the military sense, the eye piece would put a targeting diamond over a target while you were looking at it and would be either clear, or light up a single pixel on the edge of the screen where you would have to look to see the diamond(s).

On fighter yets the hud is fixed over the cockpit 'dash' and doesn't move relative to your head, so when you look out of the cockpit it isn't in front of your eyes.

The conclusions NASA came to was that locating stuff and anchoring it in space around the pilot was essential in keeping the pilot from losing situational awareness and instead looking at the display on the glass.

In the Russian helmet, they would need some way to combine your GPS location, and head orientation, to perhaps put virtual cones in the road in front of you showing you where to go.

Some anecdotes from a military pilot friend: Pilots transitioning back to civilian life sometimes get into accidents on the road because they're so used to being "heads down" on their instruments. When you're flying a jet in the sky, there's not really anything you can run into, so you get used to that sort of behavior.

Air force pilots are trained to use a HUD. Motorcycle pilots aren't. A HUD is probably ideal if you are used to it, but I fear the first hours.

Ideally, this should be tested.

This technology has been available in Cadillacs for years. Go drive an ATS if you want to see it in action. Not distracting at all.

ATS HUD: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpXYwoZ6zWw

For a while they even had a radar overlay so you could see deer in the road on your HUD before your eyes could in the dark.

Looks like the Cadillac HUD is fairly low on the windshield:

http://cdn0.mos.techradar.futurecdn.net//art/car%20tech/Head...

Agreed.

I think the best solution for GPS on a bike is probably Google Maps on some sort of phone receiving input from it only through TTS over headphones in your helmet. If you needed to interact with it you would just pull over first. Everything needed for that solution probably exists already.

This is already how I do navigation while in my car, though in a few (increasingly rare) cases I still find myself looking at the screen for clarification. Iron out those cases and screen-less will become the best way to use navigation.

I use google maps from my iPhone bluetoothing to my helmet. Very effective and not distracting. This solution is dreadfully dangerous IMHO.

Its in my center view hence I do not care for it. Give me information in my periphery, nothing to distract from what I am looking at in my standard fov.

I am already used to glancing down for speed and such on occasion, I really don't want something elsewhere. There is just too much chance of it impeding my view at the wrong time. Its already annoying when that one damn bug impacts that spot your looking through all the time.

Depending upon how they do it, I don't think it would be a big deal, if you had a small road up overtop of say a tree, you would still clearly see the tree behind it.

Assuming that it is not a very "strong" image, I assume it has some transparency?