XR Keyboard
Ultraleap Research
Overview
How do you comfortably type in VR without using a physical keyboard or controller? This was the question I explored with Pip Turner.
The lack of tactile response makes using your hands in VR more challenging than you might expect. This meant time spent testing different layouts to improve comfort and reliability as well as fine tuning of individual key response.
The keyboard became a helpful module you could use to generate new keyboard layouts and language maps in the editor for including in your projects. The key arrangement, spacing and visual design can be customised to suit your needs. The keyboard supports long press access to accents, shift modifiers and even emojis.
Read more about the research on the Ultraleap Labs Blog
Approach
Built with Unity using a combination of the Ultraleap interaction engine and Unity UI and optimised for use in XR headsets.
The research focussed on the more occasional use of text entry such as passwords, where autocomplete isn't an option as this is the more challenging case.
Daily user testing using random word generators and repeated phrases allowed us to test intuitiveness and learnability of the system.
We also held a hack day to explore the flexibility of the customising system, resulting in some weird and wonderful creations.
Source code available on github