Text input tool for immersive VR based on 3 x 3 screen cells

Abstract

This paper presents a noble text input tool for immersive VR by exploiting 3x3 screen cells. Our tool presents an input interface, which is similar to that of mobile phones. As the character layout on the interface, we exploit mobileQWERTY layout that arranges alphabet characters in 3x3 keys according to the QWERTY-similarity. In order to present more convenient pointing scheme for a key on the interface, we present a Screen Cell-based scheme, which divides the whole screen in front of a user into 3x3 structure. Instead of pointing a small key in the interface with a 3D pointing device, which shows less accuracy than familiar 2D pointing devices such as mouse, users can point the key indirectly by pointing its corresponding cell. We develop a VR game using our text input tool. Finally, our tool is compared to other text input tools: onscreen keyboard and onscreen keypad with direct input. The result of the comparison shows our tool records best performance and learnability. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.