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SlideRing: Robust Dual-IMU Thumb-to-Finger Text Input for Virtual Reality.
Tao Sun1, Nuo Jia2, Dawei Jiao3
1Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changchun 130033, China.
Sensors (Basel, Switzerland)
|July 15, 2026
Summary
Virtual Reality (VR) text entry is improved with SlideRing, a wearable system using thumb-to-finger gestures detected by miniature Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs). This method offers robust, low-demand text input for VR environments.
Area of Science:
- Human-Computer Interaction
- Virtual Reality
- Wearable Technology
Background:
- Text entry in Virtual Reality (VR) is a significant bottleneck for productivity.
- Optical hand tracking methods are often unstable due to self-occlusion, poor lighting, or out-of-view interactions.
Purpose of the Study:
- To introduce SlideRing, a novel dual-thumb wearable text-entry method for VR.
- To evaluate the effectiveness of IMU-based micro-gesture recognition for text input.
Main Methods:
- SlideRing utilizes two miniature Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) to sense thumb-to-finger micro-gestures.
- A dual-stream recognition model decodes subtle inertial signals for joint finger-action classification.
- Two keyboard layouts were evaluated: ergonomic and QWERTY-compatible.
Main Results:
- The recognition model achieved 96.5% target-finger accuracy and 94.2% action-type accuracy.
- Text entry speed improved significantly, with the ergonomic layout reaching 15.75 words per minute (WPM) and the QWERTY-compatible layout reaching 15.25 WPM.
- The ergonomic layout reduced physical demand, while the QWERTY-compatible layout lowered initial mental load.
Conclusions:
- IMU-based thumb-to-finger input offers a viable solution for robust, low-visual-demand text entry in VR.
- SlideRing demonstrates the potential to overcome limitations of current VR text-entry methods.
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