Efficient Text Entry Research Articles

MODEL IMPLEMENTATION AND COMPREHENSIVE STUDY ON VISUAL AIR TYPING SYSTEMS

This paper explores the implementation and applications of visual air typing systems, focusing on fingertip detection and text recognition to provide an alternative to the traditional input methods. Although models with similar functionality exist, our study emphasizes how such systems can offer practical solutions for users with visual impairments and enhance user experience in virtual reality (VR) environments. By detecting fingertip movements and translating them into written words, such models present a seamless and intuitive user experience. For individuals with visual impairments, traditional keyboards can be challenging, and sign language lacks uniformity across different regions. An air typing system addresses these issues by offering a consistent text input method. Additionally, in VR applications where traditional keyboards are impractical, it enables more natural and efficient text entry. This paper provides a comprehensive review of existing air typing technologies, detailing their strengths and limitations. We discuss the potential future directions for air typing systems, highlighting the need for more inclusive and versatile input methods. Our findings indicate that air typing can significantly enhance user interaction in diverse environments, making it a valuable alternative to traditional keyboards. Overall, this study underscores the practical applications and benefits of air typing systems, particularly for visually impaired users and VR contexts, contributing to advancing more inclusive technological solutions.

Text Entry Performance and Situation Awareness of a Joint Optical See-Through Head-Mounted Display and Smartphone System.

Optical see-through head-mounted displays (OST HMDs) are a popular output medium for mobile Augmented Reality (AR) applications. To date, they lack efficient text entry techniques. Smartphones are a major text entry medium in mobile contexts but attentional demands can contribute to accidents while typing on the go. Mobile multi-display ecologies, such as combined OST HMD-smartphone systems, promise performance and situation awareness benefits over single-device use. We study the joint performance of text entry on mobile phones with text output on optical see-through head-mounted displays. A series of five experiments with a total of 86 participants indicate that, as of today, the challenges in such a joint interactive system outweigh the potential benefits.

Handwriting for efficient text entry in industrial VR applications: influence of board orientation and sensory feedback on performance.

Text entry in Virtual Reality (VR) is becoming an increasingly important task as the availability of hardware increases and the range of VR applications widens. This is especially true for VR industrial applications where users need to input data frequently. Large-scale industrial adoption of VR is still hampered by the productivity gap between entering data via a physical keyboard and VR data entry methods. Data entry needs to be efficient, easy-to-use and to learn and not frustrating. In this paper, we present a new data entry method based on handwriting recognition (HWR). Users can input text by simply writing on a virtual surface. We conduct a user study to determine the best writing conditions when it comes to surface orientation and sensory feedback. This feedback consists of visual, haptic, and auditory cues. We find that using a slanted board with sensory feedback is best to maximize writing speeds and minimize physical demand. We also evaluate the performance of our method in terms of text entry speed, error rate, usability and workload. The results show that handwriting in VR has high entry speed, usability with little training compared to other controller-based virtual text entry techniques. The system could be further improved by reducing high error rates through the use of more efficient handwriting recognition tools. In fact, the total error rate is 9.28% in the best condition. After 40 phrases of training, participants reach an average of 14.5 WPM, while a group with high VR familiarity reach 16.16 WPM after the same training. The highest observed textual data entry speed is 21.11 WPM.

Exploration of Assistive Technologies Used by People with Quadriplegia Caused by Degenerative Neurological Diseases

ABSTRACTVarious assistive devices and interfaces to access the computer have been developed for people with severe motor impairments. This article explores how effective these technologies are for individuals with quadriplegia caused by degenerative neurological diseases. The following questions are studied: (1) What activities are performed? (2) What tools are used? (3) What are the advantages and limitations of the tools? (4) How do users learn about and choose assistive technologies? (5) Why are some technologies abandoned? Results of a qualitative study with 15 participants indicate that study participants have strong needs for efficient text entry and communication that are not met. A lack of information about technology options limits the choices of several of the study participants. The study revealed that automated interface personalization and adaptation to disease progression should be important design goals for future assistive technologies that support users with quadriplegia caused by degenerative neurological diseases.

스마트워치에서의 효율적인 문자입력을 위한 트랙볼 센서 기반 UI 설계 및 구현

최근 사용자들의 취향을 고려하는 다양한 디자인을 내세워 기존의 안경, 시계 등의 친숙한 형태의 웨어러블 디바이스가 등장하면서 많은 인기를 얻고 있다. 하지만 착용이 가능한 초소형 디바이스라는 특성을 고려하지 않고 기존의 스마트폰 UI/UX를 적용하였기 때문에 작은 디스플레이 상에서 문자 입력이라는 문제점을 안고 있다. 이에 본 논문에서는 스마트워치와 같은 웨어러블 디바이스의 기존 입력 방법과 관련 연구들을 분석하여 UI/UX에 대한 문제점을 도출하고 스마트 워치를 위한 새로운 입력 방식을 제안한다. 이를 위해, 트랙볼 센서를 활용하여 웨어러블 디바이스에서 효율적인 문자 입력이 가능하도록 설계하고 구현한 결과를 통해 제안된 인터페이스의 유용성 및 성능을 검증한다. Recently, wearable devices have gained popularity with familiar form factors and designs of eye-wear and watch to satisfy wearers' various preferences. Since UI/UX of smartphones can not be applied directly on smaller wearable devices, text entry on wearable devices is still problematic. In this paper, we first identify UI/UX problems of existing input methods and propose a new input method for wearable devices specifically targeting smartwatch platforms. We design and implement an efficient text entry method for wearable devices using trackball sensor and evaluate its performance and usability.

An Approach to Design Virtual Keyboards for Text Composition in Indian Languages

Of late there has been significant development in Information and Communication Technology (ICT), which offers interaction with computing systems in a large scale. Text input mechanisms in users’ own languages are necessary for bringing the ICT advantages to the English illiterates. QWERTY keyboard, however, which was designed for text entry in English, is not as suitable for text composition in other languages. As an alternative, researchers advocate virtual keyboards in users’ mother languages. This article proposes an approach to designing virtual keyboards suitable for text entry in Indian languages. Composition of texts in Indian languages using virtual keyboards needs special attention due to the presence of large character sets, complex characters, inflexions, and so on. First, we examine the suitability of existing design principles in developing virtual keyboards in Indian languages. Then we propose a virtual keyboard layout suitable for efficient text entry in Indian languages. We have tested our approach with the three most spoken languages in India, namely, Bengali, Hindi, and Telugu. Performance of the keyboards have been evaluated, and the evaluation substantiates that proposed design achieves on average higher text entry rather than with conventional virtual keyboards. The proposed approach, in fact, provides a solution to deal with complexity in Indian languages and can be extended to many other languages in the world.

The Effects of Perceptual Grouping on Text Entry Performance

One of the primary challenges confronting designers of mobile computing devices is the issue of efficient text entry. One potential solution is to group multiple letters onto single keys, similar to the T9 keyboard currently used on telephones. However, grouping multiple letters onto single keys may make the visual search for individual letters within the grouped-key more difficult analogous to Navon's (1977) “can't see the trees for the forest” effect. Two experiments examined the effects of perceptual grouping on soft keyboard transcription rates. Results from Experiment 1 showed significantly slower transcription rates for QWERTY keyboards with grouped keys (ρ = .001). Results from Experiment 2 showed various levels of perceptual interference due to the different Gestalt grouping effects (ρ = .003). These results indicate that perceptual grouping can negatively affect text entry performance, and placing multiple letters onto single keys reduces the speed at which users can transcribe words.

Evaluation of text input mechanisms for wearable computers

This paper reports on an experiment investigating the functionality and usability of novel input devices on a wearable computer for text entry tasks. Over a 3-week period, 12 subjects used three different input devices to create and save short textual messages. The virtual keyboard, forearm keyboard, and Kordic keypad input devices were assessed for their efficiency and usability in simple text-entry tasks. Results collected included the textual data created by the subjects, the duration of activities, the survey data and observations made by supervisors. The results indicated that the forearm keyboard is the best performer for accurate and efficient text entry while other devices may benefit from more work on designing specialist graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for the wearable computer.