Physical keyboards in Virtual reality: Analysis of typing performance and effects of avatar hands

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openAccess

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Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

A4 Artikkeli konferenssijulkaisussa

Date

2018-04-20

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Mcode

Degree programme

Language

en

Pages

9

Series

CHI 2018 - Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Abstract

Entering text is one of the most common tasks when interacting with computing systems. Virtual Reality (VR) presents a challenge as neither the user's hands nor the physical input devices are directly visible. Hence, conventional desktop peripherals are very slow, imprecise, and cumbersome. We developed a apparatus that tracks the user's hands, and a physical keyboard, and visualize them in VR. In a text input study with 32 participants, we investigated the achievable text entry speed and the effect of hand representations and transparency on typing performance, workload, and presence. With our apparatus, experienced typists benefited from seeing their hands, and reach almost outside-VR performance. Inexperienced typists profited from semi-transparent hands, which enabled them to type just 5.6 WPM slower than with a regular desktop setup. We conclude that optimizing the visualization of hands in VR is important, especially for inexperienced typists, to enable a high typing performance.

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Keywords

Hands, Physical keyboard, Text entry, Virtual Reality

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Citation

Knierim, P, Schwind, V, Feit, A M, Nieuwenhuizen, F & Henze, N 2018, Physical keyboards in Virtual reality : Analysis of typing performance and effects of avatar hands . in CHI 2018 - Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems ., 345, ACM, ACM SIGCHI Annual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Montreal, Canada, 21/04/2018 . https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3173919