Effects of Hand Representations for Typing in Virtual Reality

TL;DR

This study compares four hand representations in VR for typing on physical keyboards, finding fingertip visualization and video inlay reduce errors without affecting typing speed.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of hand representations in VR for text entry, highlighting effective visualization methods for reducing errors.

Findings

Fingertip visualization reduces text entry errors.

Video inlay also reduces errors significantly.

No significant difference in typing speed across representations.

Abstract

Alphanumeric text entry is a challenge for Virtual Reality (VR) applications. VR enables new capabilities, impossible in the real world, such as an unobstructed view of the keyboard, without occlusion by the user's physical hands. Several hand representations have been proposed for typing in VR on standard physical keyboards. However, to date, these hand representations have not been compared regarding their performance and effects on presence for VR text entry. Our work addresses this gap by comparing existing hand representations with minimalistic fingertip visualization. We study the effects of four hand representations (no hand representation, inverse kinematic model, fingertip visualization using spheres and video inlay) on typing in VR using a standard physical keyboard with 24 participants. We found that the fingertip visualization and video inlay both resulted in statistically significant lower text entry error rates compared to no hand or inverse kinematic model representations. We found no statistical differences in text entry speed.