Environment friendly textual content entry with out an precise keyboard stays an industry-wide problem for unlocking productiveness use-cases in XR headsets. Researchers have created a complete catalog of current textual content entry strategies to codify completely different strategies and analyze their professionals and cons. By making the catalog freely obtainable, the researchers hope to provide others a head begin on creating new and improved strategies.
Visitor Article by Max Di Luca
Massimiliano Di Luca leads the VR Lab on the College of Birmingham, UK, the place he’s an Affiliate Professor within the College of Psychology and within the College of Laptop Science. He beforehand labored at Meta the place he pioneered work readily available inputs and haptics for VR. His most up-to-date collaboration with {industry} was lately acknowledged by the ACM SIGCHI 2025 awards for pioneering the interplay framework of Android XR by means of exemplary industry-academia collaboration, establishing foundational enter strategies and interplay tips for XR working programs.
As immersive experiences change into more and more refined, the problem of environment friendly textual content entry stays an important barrier to seamless interplay in digital and augmented actuality (VR/AR). From composing emails in digital workspaces to logging-in and socializing within the metaverse, the power to enter textual content effectively is important for the usability of all purposes in prolonged actuality (XR).
To deal with this problem, my crew from the VR Lab on the College of Birmingham (UK) together with researchers from the College of Copenhagen, Arizona State College, the Max Planck Institute for Clever Techniques, Northwestern College, and Google developed the XR TEXT Trove—a complete analysis initiative cataloging over 170 textual content entry strategies tailor-made for XR. The TEXT Trove is a structured repository of textual content entry strategies and a sequence of filters that intention at choosing and highlighting the professionals and cons of the breadth of textual content enter strategies developed for XR in each academia and {industry}.
These strategies are categorised utilizing a spread of 32 codes, together with 13 interplay attributes corresponding to Enter System, Physique Half (for enter), Concurrency, and Haptic Suggestions Modality, in addition to 14 efficiency metrics like Phrases Per Minute (WPM) and Complete Error Fee (TER). All in all, the variety of strategies and extensivity of the attributes present a complete overview of the state of XR textual content entry strategies.
A number of key takeaways may be surmised from our analysis. Initially, textual content enter efficiency is inherently restricted by the variety of inputting parts (whether or not fingers, controllers, or different character selectors). Solely multi-finger typing can result in efficiency similar to touch-typing pace with a keyboard on common PCs. As visualized within the plots under, every further enter factor (or finger) provides about 5 WPM pace on prime customers.
Phrases per minute utilizing a number of fingers, and completely different enter units. (every dot represents one method analyzed within the examine).
Our analysis additionally signifies that haptic suggestions, the presence of exterior surfaces, and fingertip-only visualization are preferable methods to enhance typing efficiency. As an example, typing on surfaces (as an alternative of in mid-air) contributes to a extra snug and doubtlessly extra environment friendly typing expertise. Exterior surfaces additionally reduce sustained muscle pressure, making interactions extra snug and lowering the onset of Gorilla Arm Syndrome.
Lastly, and extra curiously, as of immediately, no various has absolutely changed the keyboard format, in all probability as a result of it nonetheless delivers the best words-per-minute. Maybe as a result of it additionally requires excessive studying curves. We imagine that the primary path for sooner typing in VR than PC may lay on the necessity to cut back journey distances on a multi-finger keyboard through Machine Studying and AI. XR wants its personal ‘swipe typing’ second, which made one-finger typing on smartphones far more environment friendly.
In that regard, the deep dive from the XR Textual content Trove represents a major step in direction of a extra complete understanding of textual content enter in digital and augmented actuality. By offering a structured and searchable database, we aimed to supply a useful resource for researchers and builders alike, paving the way in which for extra environment friendly and user-friendly textual content entry options within the immersive future.
As we clarify in our paper, this work has the potential to considerably profit the XR neighborhood: “To assist XR analysis and design on this space, we make the database and the related device obtainable on the XR TEXT Trove web site. The complete paper shall be offered on the prestigious ACM CHI convention subsequent month in Yokohama, Japan.
A number of authors in our crew are co-creators of the Locomotion Vault, which equally catalogs VR locomotion strategies in an effort to provide researchers and designers a head-start on figuring out and bettering numerous strategies.
