ErgoGlide: A Wearable Trackball Device for Ergonomic Text Entry in Virtual Reality

2026-05-30

AI Summary

This work addresses the longstanding challenge in virtual reality (VR) text input of simultaneously achieving high speed, accuracy, and ergonomic comfort. To this end, the authors propose ErgoGlide, a lightweight ring-mounted wearable trackball device paired with a hexagonal-layout virtual keyboard. Users precisely select keys by rotating the integrated miniature trackball, substantially minimizing thumb movement. The design pioneers the integration of a micro trackball into a finger-ring form factor and incorporates a multimodal confirmation mechanism alongside an interactive training strategy. Experimental results demonstrate that ErgoGlide maintains high typing accuracy and usability while significantly improving input speed after user training, thereby offering an effective optimization of human–computer interaction for VR text entry.

Abstract

In virtual reality, it is challenging to achieve satisfactory text entry speed/accuracy, ergonomics, usability, and learnability. To address this issue, we developed ErgoGlide, a novel lightweight and compact wearable device that facilitates text entry tasks in virtual environments. The proposed ErgoGlide can be regarded as a small trackball that is wearable on a user's finger like a ring. By using ErgoGlide with a hive-like virtual keyboard, the user can rotate the ball for key selections, making text entry intuitive and accurate. We conducted three user studies to evaluate ErgoGlide and found that key confirmation techniques have significant effects on text entry speed and the hive-like keyboard design significantly reduced thumb movements. Furthermore, ErgoGlide can significantly improve typing accuracy, ergonomics, and usability over previous text entry methods. Experimental results also indicated that the typing speed of ErgoGlide can be notably improved after training.

Problem

• virtual reality
• text entry
• ergonomics
• usability
• learnability

Innovation

• wearable trackball
• ergonomic text entry
• virtual reality
• hive-like keyboard
• finger-worn device