Efficient Flower Text Entry in Virtual Reality

Text entry is a frequently used task in virtual reality (VR) applications, and controller is the most common interactive device in current VR systems. However, in terms of typing speed, there is still a gap between the existing controller-based text entry techniques and using a physical keyboard in reality, so it is important to improve the efficiency of the controller-based text entry. In this paper, we introduce Flower Text Entry, a single-controller text entry method based on a newly designed flower-shaped keyboard using hand 3D translation interaction for letters selection. We conduct user studies to optimize the keyboard design and the mapping between the interaction and selection, so as to evaluate our method. The results show that our method has high typing speed, lower error rate, and is very friendly to novices compared with the state-of-the-art controller-based text entry methods. After a short training, the novice group can type at 17.65 words per minute (WPM), and the potential expert group can type at 22.97 WPM. The highest typing speed is up to 30.80 WPM achieved by a potential expert participant.