Text-entry on a miniature peripheral for wearable devices

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Date
2018-08
Authors
Kim, Junhyeok
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Abstract

Users can benefit from using an auxiliary peripheral that could mitigate many concerns with direct text-entry on wearable devices. I introduce ThumbText, a thumb-operated text-entry approach for a ring-sized touch surface. Through a multi-part exploration, I first identify a suitable discretization of the miniature touch surface for thumb input. I then design a number of two-step selection techniques for supporting the input of at least 28 characters. On a miniature touch surface, I find that a continuous touch-slide-lift selection technique in a 2×3 grid discretization offers improved performance gains over other selection methods. Finally, I evaluate ThumbText against techniques also designed for wearable devices and find that ThumbText (11.41 words-per-minute) allows for higher text-entry rates than SwipeBoard (6.49 words-per-minute) and H4-Writer (6.83 words-per-minute). I finally demonstrate that with ThumbText, users can benefit from a unique text-entry technique that transfers well across different wearable displays, such as smartwatches and head-worn displays.

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Keywords
Text-Entry, Wearable, Human Factor, Smartwatch, Head-Worn Display, Touch, Thumb, Design, User Interface, Input Devices
Citation
Junhyeok Kim, William Delamare, Pourang Irani. ThumbText:Text-Entry for Wearable Devices using a Miniature Ring. In Proceedings of the 44rd Graphics Interface Conference (GI ’18), 2018
Junhyeok Kim, William Delamare, Yumiko Sakamoto, Tony Havelka, and Pourang Irani. Challenges Identified During Early Prototyping of a Ubiquitous Text-Entry System. In Workshops of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’17 EA), 2017.
Junhyeok Kim, William Delamare, Yumiko Sakamoto, Tony Havelka, and Pourang Irani. Toward a Pool of Text-Entry Input Techniques. In Workshops of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’17 EA), 2017.