3 research outputs found
Text Entry in Immersive Head-Mounted Display-Based Virtual Reality Using Standard Keyboards
We study the performance and user experience of two popular mainstream text
entry devices, desktop keyboards and touchscreen keyboards, for use in Virtual
Reality (VR) applications. We discuss the limitations arising from limited
visual feedback, and examine the efficiency of different strategies of use. We
analyze a total of 24 hours of typing data in VR from 24 participants and find
that novice users are able to retain about 60% of their typing speed on a
desktop keyboard and about 40-45\% of their typing speed on a touchscreen
keyboard. We also find no significant learning effects, indicating that users
can transfer their typing skills fast into VR. Besides investigating baseline
performances, we study the position in which keyboards and hands are rendered
in space. We find that this does not adversely affect performance for desktop
keyboard typing and results in a performance trade-off for touchscreen keyboard
typing
ReconViguRation: Reconfiguring Physical Keyboards in Virtual Reality.
Physical keyboards are common peripherals for personal computers and are efficient standard text entry devices. Recent research has investigated how physical keyboards can be used in immersive head-mounted display-based Virtual Reality (VR). So far, the physical layout of keyboards has typically been transplanted into VR for replicating typing experiences in a standard desktop environment. In this paper, we explore how to fully leverage the immersiveness of VR to change the input and output characteristics of physical keyboard interaction within a VR environment. This allows individual physical keys to be reconfigured to the same or different actions and visual output to be distributed in various ways across the VR representation of the keyboard. We explore a set of input and output mappings for reconfiguring the virtual presentation of physical keyboards and probe the resulting design space by specifically designing, implementing and evaluating nine VR-relevant applications: emojis, languages and special characters, application shortcuts, virtual text processing macros, a window manager, a photo browser, a whack-a-mole game, secure password entry and a virtual touch bar. We investigate the feasibility of the applications in a user study with 20 participants and find that, among other things, they are usable in VR. We discuss the limitations and possibilities of remapping the input and output characteristics of physical keyboards in VR based on empirical findings and analysis and suggest future research directions in this area