  Text selection is an essential activity in interactive systems, including
virtual reality (VR) head-mounted displays (HMDs). It is useful for: sharing
information across apps or platforms, highlighting and making notes while
reading articles, and text editing tasks. Despite its usefulness, the space of
text selection interaction is underexplored in VR HMDs. In this research, we
performed a user study with 24 participants to investigate the performance and
user preference of six text selection techniques (Controller+Dwell,
Controller+Click, Head+Dwell, Head+Click, Hand+Dwell, Hand+Pinch). Results
reveal that Head+Click is ranked first since it has excellent speed-accuracy
performance (2nd fastest task completion speed with 3rd lowest total error
rate), provides the best user experience, and produces a very low workload --
followed by Controller+Click, which has the fastest speed and comparable
experience with Head+Click, but much higher total error rate. Other methods can
also be useful depending on the goals of the system or the users. As a first
systematic evaluation of pointing*selection techniques for text selection in
VR, the results of this work provide a strong foundation for further research
in this area of growing importance to the future of VR to help it become a more
ubiquitous and pervasive platform.
