CrowbarLimbs: A Fatigue-Reducing VR Typing System

Abstract

We present "CrowbarLimbs", a new method with two deformable extending virtual limbs for text entry in virtual reality (VR) which relies on a crowbar-like metaphor. Text entry is the basis of many applications but remains challenging in VR environments, where some body parts of a user may quickly get fatigued by using previous selection-based methods [Speicher et al. 2018], such as the ray metaphor [Lee and Kim 2017] and "DrumStick"[Doronichev 2016]. By adding two deformable virtual limbs and placing the virtual keyboard at a user-preferred location, our method can help users to place their hands in a comfortable posture, thus reducing the physical fatigue of different body parts, such as arms and shoulders. To the best knowledge of ours, previous text entry papers have not yet discussed which metaphor is more suitable for reducing physical fatigue. We thus introduce "CrowbarLimbs"to allow less fatigue, good system usability, and comparable text entry speed/accuracy to previous methods.