Exploring tilting methods for typing under water

Underwater environments are still providing significant challenges for diver communication and interaction. Smartphones and tablets have the potential to provide great assistance for divers under water and even allow them to utilize augmented and mixed reality, but the housing solutions limit their capabilities. In particular, interaction with them cannot harness a touch screen medium. This paper presents a novel way of providing textual input in underwater environments. The concept is utilizing orientation sensors allowing for tilting a smartphone to input textual information. Three different titling configurations of keyboards were implemented and evaluated on land and in a swimming pool in a user study that involved 17 healthy volunteers and assessed their performance in two different conditions reflecting two typical diving poses. Results clearly demonstrate the benefit of this technique and suggest more effective configurations. A following discussion derives general recommendations for implementing similar methods that use tilting to interact with devices under water.