This paper presents VirtualQWERTY, an effective and powerful textual communication toolkit for virtual reality. The first key idea of this paper is that we exploit the text input mechanism on mobile phones. We present a widget whose user interface is similar to that of the keypad on a mobile phone. Each keypad is composed of several buttons that have several characters. The second key idea of this paper is that the characters on the keypad are arranged by mimicking the character layout of the QWERTY keyboard. These key ideas present users an intuitive and easily learnable textual communication toolkit in virtual reality. In order to exploit VirtualQWERTY, we present an indexing scheme by which users locate the button they want and a selection scheme by which users choose the desired character from the characters on the button using various input devices. After testing this tool by many subjects, we draw an important conclusion about the performance of the textual communication toolkit in virtual environments.
['Jaewoo Ahn', 'Kyungha Min']
VirtualQWERTY : textual communication in virtual reality