Towards Utilizing Touch-sensitive Physical Keyboards for Text Entry in Virtual Reality

Abstract

Text entry is a challenge for Virtual Reality (VR) applications. In the context of immersive VR Head-Mounted Displays, text entry has been investigated for standard physical keyboards as well as for various hand representations. Specifically, prior work has indicated that minimalistic fingertip visualizations are an efficient hand representation. However, they typically require external tracking systems. Touch-sensitive physical keyboards allow for on-surface interaction, with sensing integrated into the keyboard itself. However, they have not been thoroughly investigated within VR. Our work brings together the domains of VR text entry and touch-sensitive physical keyboards. Specifically, we propose to utilize touch-sensitive physical keyboards for text entry as an alternative sensing mechanism for tracking user's fingertips and study its performance in a preliminary user study.