HiKeyb: High-Efficiency Mixed Reality System for Text Entry

Text entry is an imperative issue to be addressed in current entry systems for virtual environments (VEs). The entry method using a physical keyboard is still the most dominant choice for an efficient interaction regarding text entry. In this paper, we propose a typing system with a style of mixed reality, which is called HiKeyb, and it possesses a similar high-efficiency with the single physical keyboard in the real environment. The HiKeyb system consists of a depth camera, a pose tracking module, a head-mounted display (HMD), a QWERTY keyboard and a black table mat. This system can guarantee the entry efficiency and the amenity by not only introducing the force feedback from a movable physical keyboard, but also improving the immersion with the real hand image. In addition, the infrared absorption material helps improve the robustness of the system against different lighting environments. Experiments have proved that users wearing HMDs in Virtual Phrases session can achieve an entry rate of 23.1 words per minute and an error rate of 2.76%, and the rate ratio of virtual reality to real world is 78% when typing phrases. Besides, we find that the proposed system can provide a relatively close entry efficiency to that using a pure physical keyboard in the real environment.