We study the performance and user experience of two popular mainstream text entry devices, desktop keyboards and touchscreen keyboards, for use in Virtual Reality (VR) applications. We discuss the limitations arising from limited visual feedback, and examine the efficiency of different strategies of use. We analyze a total of 24 hours of typing data in VR from 24 participants and find that novice users are able to retain about 60 of their typing speed on a desktop keyboard and about 40–45 of their typing speed on a touchscreen keyboard. We also find no significant learning effects, indicating that users can transfer their typing skills fast into VR. Besides investigating baseline performances, we study the position in which keyboards and hands are rendered in space. We find that this does not adversely affect performance for desktop keyboard typing and results in a performance trade-off for touchscreen keyboard typing.
 Eye typing provides a means of communication for severely handicapped people, even those who are only capable of moving their eyes. This paper considers the features, functionality and methods used in the eye typing systems developed in the last twenty years. Primary concerned with text production, the paper also addresses other communication related issues, among them customization and voice output. For text entry methods to be useful they have to deliver high entry rates and low error rates. At the same time they need to be easy-to-learn and provide effective means of correcting mistakes. Intelligent text entry methods combine AI techniques with HCI theory to enable users to enter text as efficiently and effortlessly as possible. Here I sample a selection of such techniques from the research literature and set them into their historical context. I then highlight five challenges for text entry methods that aspire to make an impact in our society: localization, error correction, editor support, feedback, and context of use. It is generally recognized that today's frontier of HCI research lies beyond the traditional desktop computers whose GUI interfaces were built on the foundation of display—pointing device—full keyboard. Many interface challenges arise without such a physical UI foundation. Text writing—ranging from entering URLs and search queries, filling forms, typing commands, to taking notes and writing emails and chat messages—is one of the hard problems awaiting for solutions in off-desktop computing. This paper summarizes and synthesizes a research program on this topic at the IBM Almaden Research Center. It analyzes various dimensions that constitute a good text input interface; briefly reviews related literature; discusses the evaluation methodology issues of text input; presents the major ideas and results of two systems, ATOMIK and SHARK; and points out current and future directions in the area from our current vantage point. Text input for mobile or handheld devices is a flourishing research area. This article begins with a brief history of the emergence and impact of mobile computers and mobile communications devices. Key factors in conducting sound evaluations of new technologies for mobile text entry are presented, including methodology and experiment design. Important factors to consider are identified and elaborated, such as focus of attention, text creation versus text copy tasks, novice versus expert performance, quantitative versus qualitative measures, and the speed-accuracy trade-off. An exciting area within mobile text entry is the combined use of Fitts' law and a language corpus to model, and subsequently optimize, a text entry technique. The model is described, along with examples for a variety of soft keyboards as well as the telephone keypad. A survey of mobile text entry techniques, both in research papers and in commercial products, is presented.