Exploring the effects of virtual hand appearance on midair typing efficiency

Abstract

SummaryMidair typing has gradually become the potential mainstream of virtual reality (VR) typing, as it eliminates the setup of additional hardware devices and provides convenience for portable head‐mounted displays (HMDs). In midair typing, users type on a virtual keyboard while using their virtual hands. In addition to the lack of a dominant method for VR‐based midair typing, we still do not know the impact that different appearances of virtual hands could have on text input in VR. Thus, we picked a widely used midair typing method (i.e., the VR‐rendered QWERTY keyboard) and conducted a VR study to explore the effects of three hand appearances (i.e., abstract, mannequin, realistic hands) on typing efficiency in terms of typing accuracy, typing speed, and task load. Our within‐group study revealed that (1) the mannequin hand caused significantly higher performance on typing speed than the abstract and realistic hands, (2) the abstract hand caused significantly lower performance (more typing errors) on typing accuracy compared to the mannequin and realistic hands, and (3) participants rated the task load of using the abstract hand significantly higher than the mannequin and realistic hands.