Typing on Glasses: Adapting Text Entry to Smart Eyewear

One promising method to provide text input on smart eyewear devices, that has yet to be explored, is to use the device’s built in touch input. Specifically, a number of smart eyewear devices are now including a touchpad for gesture-based input on the side of the glasses (e.g. Google Glass, SiME Smart Glasses, Recon Jet, Optivent Ora). However, given their limited input space of these touchpads, text entry may still be difficult. Recent research on Smart Watch interaction has helped identify a number of promising techniques for text-entry which require very small input real estate. These include ZoomBoard [22], SplitBoard [9], Callout [13], and ZShift [13]. However, these techniques all require direct target acquisition on the display surface. In contrast, Swipeboard is a watch-based technique that specifies each characte