Accented Character Entry Using Physical Keyboards in Virtual Reality

TL;DR

This paper explores three novel techniques for efficiently entering accented characters on physical keyboards in VR, addressing a gap in current VR text entry methods and improving speed over baseline approaches.

Contribution

It introduces and compares three innovative methods for accented character entry on physical keyboards in VR, including context-aware codes, dynamic key remapping, and multimodal gaze-based selection.

Findings

Key-press-only technique improves entry speed.

Multimodal gaze-based method enhances efficiency.

Both new techniques outperform baseline in user study.

Abstract

Research on text entry in Virtual Reality (VR) has gained popularity but the efficient entry of accented characters, characters with diacritical marks, in VR remains underexplored. Entering accented characters is supported on most capacitive touch keyboards through a long press on a base character and a subsequent selection of the accented character. However, entering those characters on physical keyboards is still challenging, as they require a recall and an entry of respective numeric codes. To address this issue this paper investigates three techniques to support accented character entry on physical keyboards in VR. Specifically, we compare a context-aware numeric code technique that does not require users to recall a code, a key-press-only condition in which the accented characters are dynamically remapped to physical keys next to a base character, and a multimodal technique, in which eye gaze is used to select the accented version of a base character previously selected by key-press on the keyboard. The results from our user study (n=18) reveal that both the key-press-only and the multimodal technique outperform the baseline technique in terms of text entry speed.