Bachelor Thesis BCLR-2017-87

BibliographyNieuwenhuizen, Florian: Evaluation of typing performance in virtual reality on a physical keyboard.
University of Stuttgart, Faculty of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Information Technology, Bachelor Thesis No. 87 (2017).
55 pages, english.
CR-SchemaH.5.1 (Multimedia Information Systems)
Abstract

Nowadays, when people talk about virtual reality (VR), most think about playing computer games. VR has many fields of use, like for training and at work, that most people haven’t thought about. Input, especially text input has always been difficult for VR. Many different attempts at allowing text input in VR have been made, but none have ever combined the most used input method for the computer, the keyboard, with sub-millimeter accurate, visible hands. In the scope of this thesis, a prototype combining a motion capturing system, OptiTrack, with VR technology and the Unity game engine, was created to allow viewing hands in realtime, while inside of a virtual environment. Using this prototype, we wanted to find out, which effect hands have on typing inside of a virtual environment. Furthermore, we were interested, if there are differences in typing performance while typing inside of VR in comparison to typing outside of VR. Users will be typing while viewing different forms of hands. Is typing performance negatively impacted if no hands are visible? To answer this, different hand models were created for performing a typing test while immersed inside of the virtual environment. A study 32 participants was conducted, where each participant completed the typing test seven times while in VR and once outside of VR. Each VR condition contained a different hand model. These participants were divided into two equal typing groups, a slow and a fast one. On average, when analyzing the data of all participants at once, we found no statistically significant difference in words per minute (WPM) or accuracy when comparing typing inside of VR to typing outside of VR. The slow typers, did show a statistically significant difference in WPM and accuracy in this comparison. Furthermore, it was discovered, that seeing any sort of hand model while typing in VR is important. Not being able to see hands had a negative effect on typing performance, increased task load, and also decreased the perceived presence in VR. We found that using different hand models inside of VR does not statistically significantly affect typing performance, as long as some variation of a hand is visible.

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Department(s)University of Stuttgart, Institute of Visualisation and Interactive Systems, Visualisation and Interactive Systems
Superviser(s)Schmidt, Prof. Albrecht; Knierim, Pascal; Schwind, Valentin
Entry dateDecember 3, 2018
   Publ. Computer Science