SWIFTER: Design and Evaluation of a Speech-based Text Input Metaphor for Immersive Virtual Environments

Text input is an important part of the data annotation process, where text is used to capture ideas and comments. For text entry in immersive virtual environments, for which standard keyboards usually do not work, various approaches have been proposed. While these solutions have mostly proven effective, there still remain certain shortcomings making further investigations worthwhile. Motivated by recent research, we propose the speech-based multimodal text entry system SWIFTER, which strives for simplicity while maintaining good performance. In an initial user study, we compared our approach to smartphone-based text entry within a CAVE-like virtual environment. Results indicate that SWIFTER reaches an average input rate of 23.6 words per minute and is positively received by users in terms of user experience.