Exploring Virtual Keyboards for Text Entry in Virtual Reality

As Virtual Reality (VR) technology expands beyond entertainment, its potential as a workspace for professional tasks, such as programming, is growing. However, efficient and accurate text entry remains a significant challenge due to the lack of tactile feedback, the cognitive load of virtual typing, and ergonomic constraints. This study presents a novel custom VR keyboard designed to enhance user experience through multimodal feedback, ergonomic optimizations, and adaptive interaction models.Our custom keyboard features a smartphone-like layout with a hover effect, dynamic color transitions, haptic feedback via the SenseGlove Nova 2, auditory keypress cues, and a key-weighting mechanism to refine selection accuracy. To evaluate its performance, we conducted a controlled user study (N = 11), comparing it to a curved MRTK keyboard. Key performance metrics, including typing speed, error rate, keystroke accuracy, word accuracy, and overall user comfort, were analyzed.Results indicate that while the curved MRTK keyboard enabled faster typing speeds (8.99 WPM vs. 7.47 WPM) and higher keystroke accuracy (92.14% vs. 86.85%), the custom keyboard provided a more intuitive and engaging typing experience, particularly during prolonged use. Participants reported greater comfort with the custom keyboard, benefiting from its ergonomic design and tactile interactions. Although the custom keyboard had a slightly higher error rate (1.97% vs. 0.50%), it demonstrated improvements in user adaptability and interaction precision through multimodal feedback. Correlation analysis further revealed that enhanced haptic and visual feedback played a crucial role in improving text entry efficiency.These findings suggest that while traditional virtual keyboards may offer faster speeds, adaptive virtual keyboards with haptic integration can enhance user comfort and long-term usability. Future research should focus on refining interaction fidelity and optimizing hand tracking to further improve VR text entry performance for professional applications.