Virtual Rolling Temple: Expanding the Vertical Input Space of a Smart Glasses Touchpad

Smart glasses have not favored two-dimensional (2D) GUI. Such a trend may have originated from the limitations of smart glasses in display and input devices. While the display restriction is rapidly being resolved nowadays, 1D GUI is still the majority, indicating that the touch input device is the possible bottleneck. To tackle this issue by expanding the vertical input space of the temple touchpad, we propose the Virtual Rolling Temple (VRT). The concept is to perform 2D gestures by moving the hand in any direction while keep touching the prototype as if the temple rotates. The VRT touchpad is as thin as the spectacles’ temples, but it provides the users with input space approximately equivalent to an 80 × 80 mm square touchpad. This is 8 and 13.9 times larger than Google Glass and VUZIX M400, respectively. To validate the concept of the VRT, we constructed three demo scenarios: 2D Pointing, 2D Menu, and 2D Gesture, to cover different types of general 2D input for smart glasses.