Effect of Contact Points Feedback on Two-Thumb Touch Typing in Virtual Reality

Abstract

Two-thumb touch typing (4T) is a touchpad-based text-entry technique also used in virtual reality (VR) systems. However, the performance of 4T in VR is far below that of 4T in a real environment, such as on a smartphone. Unlike "real 4T", 4T in VR provides virtual cursors representing the thumb positions determined by a position tracker. The virtual cursor positions may differ from the thumb contact points on an input surface. Still, users may regard them as their thumb contact points. In this case, the virtual cursor movements may conflict with the thumb movements perceived by their proprioception and may contribute to typing errors. We hypothesized that virtual cursors accurately representing the contact points of the thumb can improve the performance of 4T in VR. We designed a method to provide accurate contact point feedback, and showed that accurate contact point feedback has a statistically significant positive effect on the speed of 4T in VR.