Abstract
Text editing is important and at the core of most complex tasks, like writing an email or browsing the web. Efficient and sophisticated techniques exist on desktops and touch devices, but are still underexplored for Augmented Reality Head Mounted Display (AR-HMD). Performing text selection, a necessary step before text editing, in AR display commonly uses techniques such as hand-tracking, voice commands, eye/head-gaze, which are cumbersome and lack precision. In this paper, we explore the use of a smartphone as an input device to support text selection in AR-HMD because of its availability, familiarity, and social acceptability. We propose four eyes-free text selection techniques, all using a smartphone – continuous touch, discrete touch, spatial movement, and raycasting. We compare them in a user study where users have to select text at various granularity levels. Our results suggest that continuous touch, in which we used the smartphone as a trackpad, outperforms the other three techniques in terms of task completion time, accuracy, and user preference.
