Typing with Oculus Touch and Quest [Part 1]
In this post, I decided to explore various text input possibilities for gaming and VR devices.
Currently, text input is necessary while creating accounts, typing passwords, emails, and user names, logging in, saving the games or experiences, and in-game chatting.
Considering that VR input devices can span from using controllers, to gaze, body, gestures, feet, etc., I decided to explore the most used way to enter text at this point of time — controllers. I looked into Oculus Touch and Quest controllers, as well as other dual-joystick devices, and researched the text input techniques for the devices with the limited amount of buttons, that have been used so far.
The most popular way to enter text so far seems to be a digital imitation of a QWERTY keyboard. With a gamepad, however, it becomes a tiresome process trying to navigate from letter to letter with the arrow keys. With the VR controllers, it turns into 2 or 1 finger typing on a virtual keyboard, which is also not very natural and is much slower than typing on a real physical keyboard.
Due to the lack of haptic feedback (in most cases), as well as inability to rest your arms, VR punch keyboards can also cause a lot of physical discomfort balancing hands in the air while trying to type larger chunks of text.
Running usability testing on Tvori validated this point, and proved that punching a QWERTY keyboard in VR can cause shoulder pain and tiredness in users only after as many as 15–20 keys.
There are quite a few alternatives to the QWERTY keyboard imitation for dual-joystick devices or devices with a limited amount of buttons. Using those alternatives makes typing much faster, however, there still seems to be a bit of a steep learning curve using those due to not knowing the position of the keys or having a completely new type of interaction.
Slashcards is an option for dual-joystick typing with QWERTY keyboard is divided into 2 halves. Each half is divided into quadrants.
The user would first choose a quadrant by moving the joystick into one of the 4 directions directions and then (optionally) turn to another direction to select the key within the quadrant.
Thus, on the left half of the keyboard, moving the joystick right would select the “FTGB” quadrant, and moving up would select “T”; moving down, “B”, pressing all the way to the right would select “G”, and a stick position not on the right edge of the joystick would be “F”.
I find Slashcards an interesting solution, however, the user would have to get used to the exact quadrant groups of letters to know the primary joystick direction they need to move to access a certain letter.
An interesting example of a type input can be found in Beyond Good and Evil. Users have to select characters with a single joystick, however, interaction is still more fluid than a traditional QWERTY single joystick input, which can also enhance the speed of typing.
Mobile multi-tap technique tackled the limited amount of buttons and hid up to 5 symbols under one button. I remember when trying it for the first time it felt odd, but after a few texts the input seemed easy and fast enough. The positive thing about the multi-tap technique was that it was intuitive enough and you could see right away where the needed keys were.
Sketches for the input
Looking through different text input options, I propose a different approach to improve the speed of typing for dual-joystick devices like Oculus Quest, Oculus Rift and gamepads, keeping it intuitive enough to minimise the learning time for the new user.
The approach includes a multi-tap technique, where each joystick has 4 tapping directions, and each direction covers 3–4 letters. Alt triggers and grips allow users to insert space, delete, point and select, as well as switch to numbers and symbols:
With this proposal, I wanted to test a few hypotheses:
- Users will be able to improve the speed of typing with the proposed text input technique as opposed to QWERTY layout keyboard operated with Oculus Touch or Quest controllers.
- Users will find it less physically exhausting to type larger chunks of text with the proposed text input technique as opposed to VR QWERTY punch keyboards.
Next
Next steps to test the hypotheses would include:
- Creating a working prototype.
- Recruiting up to 10 users, and asking them to reproduce the same block of text with the QWERTY punch keyboard in VR, and the proposed text input technique, and measuring the time of typing in the given block of text.
- Observing users motions and hands resting times during different text input techniques; as well as collecting subjective feedback on whether they found either of the techniques more or less physically exhausting.
