Text Entry in Immersive Head-Mounted Display-based Virtual Reality using Standard Keyboards

TL;DR

This study compares desktop and touchscreen keyboards for text entry in VR, revealing user performance levels, transferability of skills, and the impact of keyboard positioning on usability.

Contribution

It provides empirical data on typing performance in VR with standard keyboards and analyzes the effects of rendering positions on user efficiency.

Findings

Novice users retain 60% of desktop keyboard speed in VR

Users retain 40-45% of touchscreen keyboard speed in VR

Keyboard position affects touchscreen typing performance

Abstract

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.