An Evaluation of Caret Navigation Methods for Text Editing in Augmented Reality
Jinghui Hu, John J. Dudley, Per Ola Kristensson · 2022 IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality Adjunct (ISMAR-Adjunct) · 2022
A common task in text editing is navigating the text caret as part of the text editing process. We explore three key dimensions in the design space of caret navigation techniques: cursor placement method, visual expansion in the form of a magnifying lens, and display distance. In addition to two commonly used cursor placement methods, direct touch and raycast, we also present a novel multimodal text cursor placement method combining eye gaze and touch gestures for optical see-through augmented reality (AR). This method allows the user to refine the caret position with an indirect mid-air virtual touch block after the caret has snapped to a location provided by an initial eye fixation. We derive eight combinations from three design dimensions and study their performance in a user study with 24 participants. Our results reveal that: 1) raycast delivered the fastest completion times among all combinations evaluated; 2) in near-field conditions the multimodal method can achieve similar performance as direct touch input with less physical effort; and 3) magnifying lenses offer no significant performance advantages for caret navigation in AR.