STAR: Smartphone-analogous Typing in Augmented Reality
This addresses the problem of text input for AR users, offering a practical solution but is incremental as it adapts existing smartphone typing methods.
The paper tackles the challenge of efficient text entry in Augmented Reality by introducing STAR, a technique that uses a virtual QWERTY keyboard on users' hands for thumb typing, achieving a mean typing speed of 21.9 WPM and a 0.3% error rate after practice.
While text entry is an essential and frequent task in Augmented Reality (AR) applications, devising an efficient and easy-to-use text entry method for AR remains an open challenge. This research presents STAR, a smartphone-analogous AR text entry technique that leverages a user's familiarity with smartphone two-thumb typing. With STAR, a user performs thumb typing on a virtual QWERTY keyboard that is overlain on the skin of their hands. During an evaluation study of STAR, participants achieved a mean typing speed of 21.9 WPM (i.e., 56% of their smartphone typing speed), and a mean error rate of 0.3% after 30 minutes of practice. We further analyze the major factors implicated in the performance gap between STAR and smartphone typing, and discuss ways this gap could be narrowed.