Effect of hovering contact point feedback on transferring two-thumb smartphone typing skill to touchpad controllers

Abstract

Touchpad controller is utilized in various computing environments, such as interactive television(TV) environment, video game console, and virtual reality (VR). Users hold the touchpad controller in their hands and perform a variety of interactions. Since text entry is one of the major human-computer interactions in these environments, an efficient text entry method on the touchpad controller is required. Two-thumb smartphone typing is a user-friendly and efficient typing method using a hand-held device. Therefore, if two-thumb smartphone typing skill is well-transferred to the touchpad controller, a user can utilize two-thumb typing on the touchpad controller as on the smartphone and conduct efficient text entry in TV and VR environments. However, efficient two-thumb typing on the touchpad controller in TV and VR environments has not been achieved due to usability problems caused by environmental differences. This study investigates the gap caused by deficient visual feedback of thumbs in TV and VR environments and bridges the gap by providing the hovering contact point feedback. With the hovering contact point feedback, the two-thumb typing skill is successfully transferred to the touchpad controller, and efficient text entry using the touchpad controller in TV and VR is achieved.