VRTyper: Keyboard for Virtual Reality Add On
Virtual Reality is often touted as the future of schools, businesses, and social gatherings. People will soon be able to use the platform to learn in a virtual classroom or conduct meetings in a virtual conference room. However, the ability to interact with the virtual environment is paramount to Virtual Reality being widely adopted across these areas. Users need to be able to do things like write and read with the same ease with which they carry out these basic tasks in the physical world. One large barrier to converting these physical spaces into virtual ones is simply one's ability to type. In a virtual conference room, you would most likely have your computer in front of you in order to take notes. How can you take notes while you're wearing a headset? Do you type on a real keyboard that is projected into the Virtual Space so that you can visualize it? Do you type freely on a keyboard that's projected anywhere onto the scene? How do we simulate a real keyboard without additional bulky hardware? Answering these questions will help to facilitate the adoption of Virtual Reality within more disciplines than just gaming, and increase the variety of situations in which it's beneficial for people to interact with each other virtually. We sought to create a simple, low cost keyboard without the lag usually associated with VR tracking.