LogInA Research Intern at Meta has recently presented STAR: Smartphone-analogous Typing in Augmented Reality, which allows you to type in AR glasses using your own hands.
Image cedit: Meta/Taejun Kim
In the realm of Human-Machine Interaction, exploring alternative input methods holds significant importance. Recently, a Research Intern at Meta has shared a novel method of typing in AR glasses and developed a demonstration to showcase its functionality.
The concept revolves around adopting a bent wrist pose, mimicking the grip of a smartphone. By wearing AR glasses, users witness the appearance of a miniature QWERTY keyboard on their hands. Typing is accomplished using both thumbs and the sensation of tactile feedback is achieved by touching one's own skin. Furthermore, transitioning to a different task simply involves adjusting the position of the hands, causing the keyboard to vanish.
Extensive testing has revealed that the typing speed using this method reached 22 words per minute, which is just twice as slow as typing on an actual smartphone.
"This research presents STAR, a smartphone-analogous AR text entry technique that leverages a user’s familiarity with smartphone two-thumb typing. With STAR, a user performs thumb typing on a virtual QWERTY keyboard that is overlain on the skin of their hands. During an evaluation study of STAR, participants achieved a mean typing speed of 21.9 WPM (i.e., 56% of their smartphone typing speed), and a mean error rate of 0.3% after 30 minutes of practice. We further analyze the major factors implicated in the performance gap between STAR and smartphone typing, and discuss ways this gap could be narrowed," as stated in the research work.
It would be interesting to observe the development and future trajectory of STAR, considering the growing popularity of exploring alternative input methods and AR technology as a whole.
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