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Exploring tilting methods for typing under water

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Abstract

Underwater environments are still providing significant challenges for diver communication and interaction. Smartphones and tablets have the potential to provide great assistance for divers under water and even allow them to utilize augmented and mixed reality, but the housing solutions limit their capabilities. In particular, interaction with them cannot harness a touch screen medium. This paper presents a novel way of providing textual input in underwater environments. The concept is utilizing orientation sensors allowing for tilting a smartphone to input textual information. Three different titling configurations of keyboards were implemented and evaluated on land and in a swimming pool in a user study that involved 17 healthy volunteers and assessed their performance in two different conditions reflecting two typical diving poses. Results clearly demonstrate the benefit of this technique and suggest more effective configurations. A following discussion derives general recommendations for implementing similar methods that use tilting to interact with devices under water.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all participants involved in our user study for their time and patience.

Funding

This research is a part of the i-MareCulture project (Advanced VR, iMmersive Serious Games and Augmented REality as Tools to Raise Awareness and Access to European Underwater CULTURal heritagE, Digital Heritage) that has received funding from the European Unions Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under Grant Agreement No. 727153. This research was also partially supported by the project that has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 739578 (RISE Call: H2020-WIDESPREAD-01-2016-2017-TeamingPhase2) and the Government of the Republic of Cyprus through the Directorate General for European Programmes, Coordination and Development.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

    Jan Čejka & Jiří Chmelík

  2. Research Centre on Interactive Media, Smart Systems and Emerging Technologies (RISE), Nicosia, 1011, Cyprus

    Fotis Liarokapis

Authors
  1. Jan Čejka
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Contributions

Conceptualization, J.Č., J.Ch., F.L.; Data curation, J.Č., J.Ch.; Formal analysis, J.Č.; Funding acquisition, F.L.; Investigation, J.Č.; Methodology, J.Č.; Project administration, F.L.; Resources, J.Č.; Software, J.Č.; Supervision, F.L.; Validation, J.Č.; Visualization, J.Č.; Writing – original draft, J.Č.; Writing – review & editing, J.Č., J.Ch., F.L.;

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Correspondence to Jan Čejka.

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Data of the tests and user feedback are attached to the manuscript as supplementary materials in electronic form.

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Čejka, J., Chmelík, J. & Liarokapis, F. Exploring tilting methods for typing under water. Multimed Tools Appl 80, 31085–31103 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-020-09305-7

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