Design and Evaluation of Controller-based Raycasting Methods for Efficient Alphanumeric and Special Character Entry in Virtual Reality

Wan, Tingjie, Wei, Yushi, Shi, Rongkai, Shen, Junxiao, Kristensson, Per Ola, Atkinson, Katie ORCID: 0000-0002-5683-4106 and Liang, Hai-Ning (2024) Design and Evaluation of Controller-based Raycasting Methods for Efficient Alphanumeric and Special Character Entry in Virtual Reality. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, PP (99). pp. 1-11.

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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/tvcg.2024.3349428

Abstract

Alphanumeric and special characters are essential during text entry. Text entry in virtual reality (VR) is usually performed on a virtual Qwerty keyboard to minimize the need to learn new layouts. As such, entering capitals, symbols, and numbers in VR is often a direct migration from a physical/touchscreen Qwerty keyboard-that is, using the mode-switching keys to switch between different types of characters and symbols. However, there are inherent differences between a keyboard in VR and a physical/touchscreen keyboard, and as such, a direct adaptation of mode-switching via switch keys may not be suitable for VR. The high flexibility afforded by VR opens up more possibilities for entering alphanumeric and special characters using the Qwerty layout. In this work, we designed two controller-based raycasting text entry methods for alphanumeric and special characters input (Layer-ButtonSwitch and Key-ButtonSwitch) and compared them with two other methods (Standard Qwerty Keyboard and Layer-PointSwitch) that were derived from physical and soft Qwerty keyboards. We explored the performance and user preference of these four methods via two user studies (one short-term and one prolonged use), where participants were instructed to input text containing alphanumeric and special characters. Our results show that Layer-ButtonSwitch led to the highest statistically significant performance, followed by Key-ButtonSwitch and Standard Qwerty Keyboard, while Layer-PointSwitch had the slowest speed. With continuous practice, participants' performance using Key-ButtonSwitch reached that of Layer-ButtonSwitch. Further, the results show that the key-level layout used in Key-ButtonSwitch led users to parallel mode switching and character input operations because this layout showed all characters on one layer. We distill three recommendations from th results that can help guide the design of text entry techniques for alphanumeric and special characters in VR.

Item Type:	Article
Divisions:	Faculty of Science and Engineering > School of Electrical Engineering, Electronics and Computer Science
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	05 Feb 2024 09:19
Last Modified:	15 Mar 2024 15:54
DOI:	10.1109/tvcg.2024.3349428
Related URLs:	Author Publisher
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3178368