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Typing on Split Keyboards with Peripheral Vision CHI 2019 Paper CHI 2019, May 4–9, 2019, Glasgow, Scotland, UK Typing on Split Keyboards with Peripheral Vision Yiqin Lu12, Chun Yu123y, Shuyi Fan1, Xiaojun Bi4, Yuanchun Shi123 1Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China 2Key Laboratory of Pervasive Computing, Ministry of Education, China 3Global Innovation eXchange Institute, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China 4Department of Computer Science, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, United States {lu-yq16,fansy15}@mails.tsinghua.edu.cn, {chunyu,shiyc}@tsinghua.edu.cn, [email protected] ABSTRACT ACM Reference Format: Split keyboards are widely used on hand-held touchscreen Yiqin Lu, Chun Yu, Shuyi Fan, Xiaojun Bi, Yuanchun Shi. 2019. devices (e.g., tablets). However, typing on a split keyboard of- Typing on Split Keyboards with Peripheral Vision. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Proceedings (CHI 2019), May ten requires eye movement and attention switching between 4–9, 2019, Glasgow, Scotland UK. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 12 pages. two halves of the keyboard, which slows users down and https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300430 increases fatigue. We explore peripheral typing, a superior typing mode in which a user focuses her visual attention on the output text and keeps the split keyboard in peripheral 1 INTRODUCTION vision. Our investigation showed that peripheral typing re- Split keyboards are specially designed to account for the duced attention switching, enhanced user experience and form factor of tablet computers (e.g., Samsung Galaxy Tab, increased overall performance (27 WPM, 28% faster) over Apple iPad, and Microsoft Surface). It split the conventional the typical eyes-on typing mode. This typing mode can be QWERTY keyboard into two halves and positions them on well supported by accounting the typing behavior in statisti- the left and right of the touchscreen respectively. Users hold cal decoding. Based on our study results, we have designed the device with two hands and type with both thumbs. Com- GlanceType, a text entry system that supported both periph- pared with regular keyboards, this allows for a steadier grip eral and eyes-on typing modes for real typing scenario. Our during walking, sitting or lying, saves precious screen real evaluation showed that peripheral typing not only well co- estate [17], and potentially improves typing performance due existed with the existing eyes-on typing, but also substan- to two-thumb use [3, 12, 21, 24]. Despite these advantages, a tially improved the text entry performance. Overall, periph- split keyboard sufers from a weakness in the conventional eral typing is a promising typing mode and supporting it eyes-on typing mode: users have to frequently switch visual would signifcantly improve the text entry performance on focus back and forth between two keyboard halves. This not a split keyboard. only causes eye/neck fatigue but also limits the typing speed [5, 16]. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Text input; Touch screens; User studies; KEYWORDS Split keyboard; peripheral vision; gaze. †denotes the corresponding author. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for proft or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the frst page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to Figure 1: A user types with the split keyboard on a tablet redistribute to lists, requires prior specifc permission and/or a fee. Request computer. He needs to see three locations when typing permissions from [email protected]. (marked in blue circles): the text feedback (URL bar in this CHI 2019, May 4–9, 2019, Glasgow, Scotland UK fgure), and the left and right keyboard halves. When he is © 2019 Association for Computing Machinery. focusing on the feld of text feedback, two split keyboard ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-5970-2/19/05. $15.00 halves are located in his peripheral vision. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300430 Paper 200 Page 1 CHI 2019 Paper CHI 2019, May 4–9, 2019, Glasgow, Scotland, UK In this paper, we investigate typing with peripheral vi- peripheral typing behavior in statistical decoding is efective sion (peripheral typing), in which a user focuses her visual in resolving the noise generated in this typing mode. Sec- attention on the output text and keeps the keyboard in her ond, we have designed a two-candidate-region mechanism peripheral vision (Figure 1). This mode does not require the supporting spontaneously choosing between eyes-on and user to switch visual attention frequently between diferent peripheral typing with no need for an explicit mode switch. parts of the interface. Peripheral typing assumes users are We have incorporated this mechanism into a text entry sys- familiar with two-thumb typing (e.g., on a smartphone) and tem called GlanceType. A user study showed that GlanceType can type with spatial and muscle memory when the keyboard improved the performance over a commercial split keyboard. is located in peripheral vision. Unlike touch typing [18] and invisible keyboard [39] that the keyboard feedback vanishes 2 RELATED WORK in typing process, a user still gains partial visual feedback Our work is related to text input, split keyboard and periph- of the keyboard when typing with peripheral vision, which eral vision. To our knowledge, no work has been done to contrasts and complements recent progress of text entry re- investigate the efect of peripheral vision in text input task. search. We believe interaction with peripheral vision is a promising paradigm where more and more interaction tasks Typing on QWERTY Layout with Visual Constrains [10, 27, 34] are competing for users’ visual attention. Touch typing, that the user performs ten-fnger typing with- We follow an iterative approach to validate the feasibility out looking at the physical keyboard, is a well-known solu- of peripheral typing on a split keyboard. We frst conduct tion to input text efciently in desktop PC scenario. After a Wizard-of-Oz experiment to collect touch data and com- long-term training, touch typing speeds of everyday typ- pare it with two baseline modes: eyes-on and no-keyboard. ists can achieve 34-79 WPM [8]. The typing performance Results show peripheral vision can indeed provide a certain of blind people [22] or able-bodied people in blind environ- degree of visual feedback for controlling thumb tapping. The ments (e.g., virtual reality) [35] has also been researched. touch accuracy of peripheral typing is lower than eyes-on As the QWERTY keyboard layout has been implemented in but signifcantly higher than no-keyboard setting. We then most touchscreen devices like smartphones, smart tabletops, combine the derived touch model and a unigram word-level tablets, etc., many works have tried to bring the touch typing language model to develop an input decoder. Both simula- from the physical keyboard to the soft keyboard. tion and real-user studies show that the decoding is efective. Typing with ten fngers on touchscreens has been exten- When entering in-vocabulary words, peripheral typing (27 sively studied. When typing on a tabletop touchscreen sur- WPM) improves the input speed by 28% over the typical eyes- face [9], touch points without the visual keyboard were rela- on typing (21 WPM). It also reduces the attention switching tively noisier than that with the visual keyboard. Splitting and increases user satisfaction. and rotating the whole keyboard on the back of the tablet To support real use that involves typing out-of-vocabulary with the fnger-to-key assignment remaining enables ten- words (e.g., uncommon names or addresses), we further pro- fnger typing when gripping the tablet. Both the physical pose a new design of text entry interface that features two version (RearType [26]) and the virtual version (Sandwich candidate lists: one beneath the output text associated with Keyboard [25]) of the keyboard have been proposed. peripheral typing and the other above the keyboard halves In order to type on a small keyboard (e.g., smartphones), associated with the default split keyboard output. With this thumb-based typing postures, including one thumb and two design, users can spontaneously choose between peripheral thumbs, are generally used. Previous works have found it typing and eyes-on typing with no explicit mode switching possible for keyboard users to use thumbs to type eyes-freely operation. This design allows peripheral typing to be eas- on mini physical keyboards [6] or soft keyboards [18, 33]. ily incorporated with the current typing approach (e.g., the Users are also able to type on an invisible keyboard [39] commercial keyboard) with little confict. We also evaluate with the speed close to that on a visible keyboard. That is, our prototype - GlanceType in a real corpus with out-of- the users possess the ability to seek keys with thumbs in vocabulary words and non-alphabetic characters. Results limited visual condition when they were well trained on show that GlanceType increase the input speed by 7.0% com- the keyboard layout (so-called spatial memory and muscle pared with the commercial keyboard. memory). Peripheral vision, one kind of important visual Our major contributions are two-folded. First, we have infuences, is worth to be explored in this area. studied an unexplored typing mode - peripheral typing. Our investigation showed that it was not only feasible but also Improving Split Keyboards promising and even superior over the typical eyes-on typ- To our knowledge, only two works have been done to im- ing. The reasons are 1) users can to a degree control thumb prove the performance of split keyboards.
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