Accented Character Entry Using Physical Keyboards in Virtual Reality

Abstract

Research on text entry in Virtual Reality (VR) has gained popularity but the efficient entry of accented characters, characters with diacritical marks, in VR remains underexplored. Entering accented characters is supported on most capacitive touch keyboards through a long press on a base character and a subsequent selection of the accented character. However, entering those characters on physical keyboards is still challenging, as they require a recall and an entry of respective numeric codes. To address this issue this paper investigates three techniques to support accented character entry on physical keyboards in VR. Specifically, we compare a context-aware numeric code technique that does not require users to recall a code, a key-press-only condition in which the accented characters are dynamically remapped to physical keys next to a base character, and a multimodal technique, in which eye gaze is used to select the accented version of a base character previously selected by key-press on the keyboard. The results from our user study (n=18) reveal that both the key-press-only and the multimodal technique outperform the baseline technique in terms of text entry speed.

Media

Techniques for entering accented characters in VR: a) BASELINE technique which displays numeric codes for relevant accented characters after pressing a modifier key (Alt) and a base character and then requires the user to enter the respective numeric code; b) RECONVIGURATION technique as presented by Schneider et al. 2019 which overlays the accented characters onto the keyboard when pressing a modifier key (Alt) and a base character; c) MULTIMODAL technique which presents the accented characters on the virtual screen while pressing a modifier key (Alt) and a base character and enables the user to select one via eye-gaze and confirm by key press.

Publication

Snehanjali Kalamkar*, Verena Biener*, Daniel Pauls, Leon Lindlein, Morteza Izadifar, Per Ola Kristensson, and Jens Grubert. Accented Character Entry Using Physical Keyboards in Virtual Reality. In Proceedings of IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality 2024 (ISMAR 2024), im Erscheinen. arxiv preprint