I think we all need a way better solution for VR input to core legacy input devices. Floating keyboards are ass and we all know it. Using gestures is also bad and solves nothing.
Hardware needs to finger register better. Make grooves or lines on the capacitive controllers so that fingers don’t get mixed up, and just have people type like normal. Let me play world of Warcraft in emulated flatscreen in vr. Have triggers of the controllers count as touchpads to work as both touch mouse clicks and micro adjustments for virtual mousing. Maybe even have dual actuation or multi level haptics on the trigger mechanism so that you can actually click the topmost or bottommost of the trigger.
I’m sick and tired of actual normal pc I/O besting VR and being something to fear while in VR, that’s dumb. VR is supposed to be better in every way, not a trade-off. The answer to “can it do x?” Needs to be YES. VR isn’t a console, it’s an evolution of I/O. So until keyb+mouse doesn’t need to be used, VR needs to get its shit together. And I don’t know about you, but a pretty gd big part of language and using a computer requires letters, and numbers. Phones are 90% of the way there and good enough. VR is not, it just tries to avoid it by design, but it always inevitably needs it, because at the end of the day, at least for now, that’s how stuff actually works.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. /rant
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Keyboards in general in vr are not very good. Excellent voice to text may be our only real integrated solution. You are basically blind when in vr and trying to use other devices will always be clumsy.
I’m a fan of the “just project a small wireless keyboard into VR”. There are some things that are difficult to solve without tactile feedback, and having a 1:1 physical representation isn’t that difficult or expensive - i.e flight sticks, gun stocks, and I’d say even keyboards. Mapping them to VR isn’t that hard either.
Force feedback/haptic triggers and vibrations are amazing step-up for how things feel, but every time something needs to have it’s fixed place in space, physical dummy is the way to go.
That is, as long as we don’t have haptics for hand tracking. Virtual keyboard in the air would IMO work fine for handtracking once you have a per-finger haptics.
Shame that AI has killed any kind of research into VR. Tbh I’d rather take Zuck’s Metaverse than whatever we’re getting now with AI at this point…
The best solution I’ve seen for typing were the original Vive’s controllers with their dual touchpads. Unfortunately none of the modern controller have large touchpads, so typing with them is way more janky.
Yeah I totally agree, touchpad qwerty gets to take advantage of muscle memory from typing on phone screens and feels really nice on the steam deck. I think that might be the best option for now - just using the steam controller for typing in VR.
It seems like it should be possible to build keyboard (and other) peripherals that exist in both virtual and physical worlds. Give them sensors similar to the hand controllers, so the headset can know where they are in space, project into VR so it’s easy to find and use.
VR handsets are incredibly flexible as spatial controls, but we’ve got all this evolution and a lifetime of learning just amazing finger dexterity. That control is based more on tactile and proprioceptive feedback than visual, so I think it’s been overlooked in the vision-focused VR space.
