Do full face helmets actually limit peripheral vision?

Made the exact same switch about six years ago, open face to full face for highway riding. The peripheral vision thing is basicly a myth with any modern helmet. A full face with a decent eye port gives you something like 90 degrees of vision on each side, which is wider than what your eyes actually use when you're looking forward. If your buddy can see a car next to him without turning his head, he's not using peripheral vision anyway, he's turning his head slightly or glancing. On a full face you do the exact same thing, just with more chin protecting your jaw.

Took me about two rides to stop noticing the chin bar, honestly. I did the swap the dumb way, just bought one and wore it, spent the first highway trip feeling like a horse with blinders on. What actually sold me was borrowing a buddy's spare lid for a weekend before committing. Got to feel the difference on my own roads instead of guessing in a shop parking lot.

If you can do that, or even just wear one around the house for an evening, you'll know real quick whether the boxed-in feeling is real or just newness. For me it faded before the first fuel stop.

Rode open face for years and the thing nobody warned me about was how much quieter a full face is on the highway. Wind noise was the reason I switched, not safety, and now an hour of riding doesn't leave my ears ringing. Side vision honestly never came up as an issue once I was moving.

One tip though, get the fit right before you buy. I grabbed one a size up because it felt comfy in the store, then it slopped around at speed and the eye port sat wrong, which realy does mess with your view. A proper fit fixes half the problems people blame on full faces.

Forty years of riding and I'll tell you what my old shop teacher used to say about the pudding basin crowd. Half the guys I started out with back in the seventies are gone, and jaw injuries were a big part of it. As for the fogging, that's the real adjustment, not the side vision. Crack the visor a notch at a stoplight in cold weather, same trick we did before breath guards existed. You'll forget the chin bar is there in a week.