PizzaText: Text Entry for Virtual Reality Systems Using Dual Thumbsticks

Abstract

We present PizzaText, a circular keyboard layout technique for text entry in virtual reality (VR) environments that uses the dual thumbsticks of a hand-held game controller. Text entry is a common activity in VR environments but remains challenging with existing techniques and keyboard layouts that is largely based on QWERTY. Our technique makes text entry simple, easy, and efficient, even for novice users. The technique uses a hand-held controller because it is still an important input device for users to interact with VR environments. To allow rapid search of characters, PizzaText divides a circle into slices and each slice contains 4 characters. To enable fast selection, the user uses the right thumbstick for traversing the slices, and the left thumbstick for choosing the letters. The design of PizzaText is based on three criteria: efficiency, learnability, and ease-of-use. In our first study, six potential layouts are considered and evaluated. The results lead to a design with 7 slices and 4 letters per slice. The final design is evaluated in a five-day study with 10 participants. The results show that novice users can achieve an average of 8.59 Words per Minute (WPM), while expert users are able to reach 15.85 WPM, with just two hours of training.

HiFinger: One-Handed Text Entry Technique for Virtual Environments Based on Touches between Fingers

“…Many studies have focused on text input using other input devices. PizzaText [38], TwoStick [39], and Sandnes [40] used a hand-held game controller to input text by multiple step confirmation. The entry speed of novices on PizzaText was 8.59 WMP after two hours of training, while that of experts could reach 15.85 WMP.…”

“…Users should easily carry the device, and wearable devices ensure portability. Therefore, products that are inconvenient for users to carry or require help from other people (for example, tablet handwriting input [6] and game controller input [38,39,40]) are not very suitable.…”

A Non-Touchscreen Tactile Wearable Interface as an Alternative to Touchscreen-Based Wearable Devices

“…In our experiments, we showed that our prototype is competitive with commercial smartwatches in its size while input events are generated responsively (55-61 ms) and accurately. We believe our approach can be useful in VR entertainment and games scenarios for using the smartwatch as an effective controller when coupled with an HMD [30,33,34]. Especially for a cross-device ecology where multiple devices are seamlessly connected [35], our approach may serve as a cohesive single interaction device to enable various cross-device interaction scenarios and applications at different scales for near, personal, social and public levels [36].…”

“…Previously joysticks are mostly used in gaming context for selecting certain targets using a game controller analog thumbstick [28]. Other uses of joysticks include issuing driving commands for wheelchairs [29] and text entry in VR systems [30]. Usability and UX aspects of the joystick-embedded UI and other wearable UIs are thoroughly examined in [27].…”

Arc-Type and Tilt-Type: Pen-based Immersive Text Input for Room-Scale VR

“…HiPad [30] uses the circular touchpad on a common VR controller to select characters laid out in a circle. PizzaText [61] similarly uses a pair joysticks (as on a modern game console controller). One joystick selects a 'slice' of four characters, and the other designates which character to choose within the slice.…”