Space Saving Text Input Method for Head Mounted Display with Virtual 12-key Keyboard

Head-Mounted Displays, or HMDs, are rapidly spreading in recent years. However, existing text input methods for HMDs have several problems, hampering their further popularization. In this paper, we focus on the two problems with existing text input methods: (1)the difficulty of its setup and (2) the space needed for its operation. To address these problems, we propose a novel text input system for HMDs. Our system (1) builds on top of a commodity camera device, Leap Motion, and (2) enables effective input in a small physical/virtual space, with a virtual 12-key keyboard. Our experimental results show the advantage of our approach over existing hand-tracking text input systems; especially our method indicates the effectiveness for Japanese text input, with a small virtual keyboard. Based on the experimental results, we believe that our text-input system is effective for any language in HMD environments, if we have a 12-key keyboard tuned for each language (as well as Japanese).