Climbing Keyboard: A Tilt-Based Selection Keyboard Entry for Virtual Reality

Abstract

Text input is one of the common interaction tasks in virtual environments. However, current inputting methods (e.g., laser-input: aim-and-shoot technique) have many limitations, such as inefficiency, lack of precision, and fatigue of long-text inputting. We propose a Climbing Keyboard method to allow easier, faster, and more accurate text input, and use tilt instead of precise aiming. The selected target changes from a specific letter to a group of letters with such a tilt-based interaction based on the QWERTY layout, which aims to reduce the learning cost, especially for novice users. Meanwhile, expert users can focus on the screen without looking at the keyboard. We designed three user studies to evaluate the performance of proposed method, including the verification of the usability of the tilt interaction method in the first study, optimization of the tilt angle range in the second study, and evaluation of the learning curve of Climbing keyboard in the last study. Our results showed that participants can reach 16.48 words per minute after an hours of training.