Input devices in immersive environments

Recently, Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR and AR) head-mounted displays have become affordable. However, efficient solutions for pointing tasks and text entry in VR and AR remain a challenge. Controllers are the typical input device in VR and many AR systems, but they are not as efficient as the mouse. Here, we investigate a pen-like pointing device that matches or exceeds the mouse's performance. We performed a user study to compare several input devices and our results show that our 3D pen significantly outperforms modern VR controllers in all evaluated measures and that it is comparable to the mouse. Text entry is a challenging task in modern VR systems, yet virtual keyboards are relatively inefficient. We introduce here a keyboard on a hawker's tray worn in front of the user, which affords compact, simple, flexible, and efficient text entry solution. We ran a text entry study with standing users, involving both lower-case sentences as well as symbols. The results show that text entry rates are affected negatively by simplistic keyboard visualizations and that our video-based solution affords desktop text entry rates.