HIBEY: Hide the Keyboard in Augmented Reality

Text input is a very challenging task in Augmented Reality (AR). On non-touch AR headsets, virtual keyboards are counter-intuitive and character keys are hard to locate inside the constrained screen real estate. In this paper, we present the design, implementation and evaluation of HIBEY, a text input system for smartglasses. HIBEY provides a fast, reliable, affordable, and easy-to-use text entry solution through vision-based freehand interactions. Supported by a probabilistic spatial model and a language model, a three-level holographic environment enables users to apply fast and continuous hand gesture to pick characters and predictive words in a keyboardless interface. Through the pilot study and a thorough evaluations lasting 8 days, we show that HIBEY leads to a mean text entry rate of 9.95 word per minute (WPM) with 96.06% accuracy, which is comparable to other state-of-the-art approaches. After 8 days, participants can achieve an average of 13.19 WPM. In addition, HIBEY only occupies 13.14% of the screen real estate at the edge region, which is 62.80% smaller than the default keyboard layout on Microsoft Hololens.