Improving Two-Thumb Touchpad Typing in Virtual Reality

Abstract

Two-Thumb Touchpad Typing (4T) using hand-held controllers is one of the common text entry techniques in Virtual Reality (VR). However, its performance is far below that of two-thumb typing on a smartphone. We explored the possibility of improving its performance focusing on the following two factors: the visual feedback of hovering thumbs and the grip stability of the controllers. We examined the effects of these two factors on the performance of 4T in VR in user experiments. Their results show that hover feedback had a significant main effect on the 4T performance, but grip stability did not. We then investigated the achievable performance of the final 4T design in a longitudinal study, and its results show that users could achieve a typing speed over 30 words per minute after two hours of practice.