ThumbText: Text-Entry for Wearable Devices using a Miniature Ring

Download Publication File

Abstract

Users can benefit from using an auxiliary peripheral that could mitigate many concerns with direct text-entry on wearable devices. We introduce ThumbText, a thumb-operated text-entry approach for a ring-sized touch surface. Through a multi-part exploration, we first identify a suitable discretization of the miniature touch surface for thumb input. We then design a number of two-step selection techniques for supporting the input of at least 28 characters. On a miniature touch surface, we find that a continuous touch-slide-lift selection technique in a 2×3 grid discretization offers improved performance gains over other selection methods. Finally, we evaluate ThumbText against techniques also designed for wearable devices and find that ThumbText allows for higher text-entry rates than SwipeBoard and H4-Writer.

Video

Download the ThumbText: Text-Entry for Wearable Devices using a Miniature Ring video file.

Citation

Junhyeok Kim, William Delamare, and Pourang Irani.ThumbText: Text-Entry for Wearable Devices using a Miniature Ring,In Proceedings of the 43rd Graphics Interface Conference (GI '18). 2018.