Evaluation of Text Selection Techniques in Virtual Reality Head-Mounted Displays

TL;DR

This study systematically evaluates six text selection techniques in VR HMDs, revealing that Head+Click offers the best balance of speed, accuracy, and user experience, guiding future VR interaction design.

Contribution

First comprehensive user study comparing multiple text selection methods in VR HMDs, providing insights into performance and user preferences.

Findings

Head+Click has the best overall performance and user experience.

Controller+Click offers the fastest task completion but higher error rates.

Other techniques may suit specific system goals or user needs.

Abstract

Text selection is an essential activity in interactive systems, including virtual reality (VR) head-mounted displays (HMDs). It is useful for: sharing information across apps or platforms, highlighting and making notes while reading articles, and text editing tasks. Despite its usefulness, the space of text selection interaction is underexplored in VR HMDs. In this research, we performed a user study with 24 participants to investigate the performance and user preference of six text selection techniques (Controller+Dwell, Controller+Click, Head+Dwell, Head+Click, Hand+Dwell, Hand+Pinch). Results reveal that Head+Click is ranked first since it has excellent speed-accuracy performance (2nd fastest task completion speed with 3rd lowest total error rate), provides the best user experience, and produces a very low workload -- followed by Controller+Click, which has the fastest speed and comparable experience with Head+Click, but much higher total error rate. Other methods can also be useful depending on the goals of the system or the users. As a first systematic evaluation of pointing*selection techniques for text selection in VR, the results of this work provide a strong foundation for further research in this area of growing importance to the future of VR to help it become a more ubiquitous and pervasive platform.