Exploration of Hands-free Text Entry Techniques For Virtual Reality

TL;DR

This study compares three hands-free text entry methods in VR, finding BlinkType to be the most preferred and achieving higher text entry rates than NeckType and DwellType.

Contribution

It introduces and evaluates two novel hands-free VR text entry techniques, BlinkType and NeckType, against the existing DwellType method.

Findings

BlinkType achieves the highest text entry rate of 13.47 wpm.

Users prefer BlinkType based on subjective feedback.

NeckType and BlinkType outperform DwellType in efficiency.

Abstract

Text entry is a common activity in virtual reality (VR) systems. There is a limited number of available hands-free techniques, which allow users to carry out text entry when users' hands are busy such as holding items or hand-based devices are not available. The most used hands-free text entry technique is DwellType, where a user selects a letter by dwelling over it for a specific period. However, its performance is limited due to the fixed dwell time for each character selection. In this paper, we explore two other hands-free text entry mechanisms in VR: BlinkType and NeckType, which leverage users' eye blinks and neck's forward and backward movements to select letters. With a user study, we compare the performance of the two techniques with DwellType. Results show that users can achieve an average text entry rate of 13.47, 11.18 and 11.65 words per minute with BlinkType, NeckType, and DwellType, respectively. Users' subjective feedback shows BlinkType as the preferred technique for text entry in VR.