Text Entry in Immersive Head-Mounted Display-based Virtual Reality using Standard Keyboards
This addresses text input challenges for VR users, but it is incremental as it evaluates existing devices rather than introducing new methods.
The study investigated text entry in VR using standard keyboards, finding that novice users retained about 60% of their typing speed on desktop keyboards and 40-45% on touchscreen keyboards, with no significant learning effects indicating fast skill transfer.
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.