HawKEY: Efficient and Versatile Text Entry for Virtual Reality

Text entry is still a challenging task in modern Virtual Reality (VR) systems. The lack of efficient text entry methods limits the applications that can be used productively in VR. Previous work has addressed this issue through virtual keyboards or showing the physical keyboard in VR. While physical keyboards afford faster text entry, they usually require a seated user and an instrumented environment. We introduce a new keyboard, worn on a hawker’s tray in front of the user, which affords a compact, simple, flexible, and efficient text entry solution for VR, without restricting physical movement. In our new video condition, we also show the keyboard only when the user is looking down at it. To evaluate our novel solution and to identify good keyboard visualizations, we ran a user study where we asked participants to enter both lowercase sentences as well as complex text while standing. The results show that text entry rates are affected negatively by simplistic keyboard visualization conditions and that our solution affords desktop text entry rates, even when standing.