Virtual Reality

I'm a fan of the "just project a small wireless keyboard into VR". There are some things that are difficult to solve without tactile feedback, and having a 1:1 physical representation isn't that difficult or expensive - i.e flight sticks, gun stocks, and I'd say even keyboards. Mapping them to VR isn't that hard either.

Force feedback/haptic triggers and vibrations are amazing step-up for how things feel, but every time something needs to have it's fixed place in space, physical dummy is the way to go.

That is, as long as we don't have haptics for hand tracking. Virtual keyboard in the air would IMO work fine for handtracking once you have a per-finger haptics.

Shame that AI has killed any kind of research into VR. Tbh I'd rather take Zuck's Metaverse than whatever we're getting now with AI at this point...

The best solution I've seen for typing were the original Vive's controllers with their dual touchpads. Unfortunately none of the modern controller have large touchpads, so typing with them is way more janky.

Keyboards in general in vr are not very good. Excellent voice to text may be our only real integrated solution. You are basically blind when in vr and trying to use other devices will always be clumsy.

The only workable solution right now is what some apps (and maybe meta now natively ?) do, which Is a keyboard projected onto a hard surface with finger tracking allow some type of feed from touching the surface.

The only other solution I might see being possible is those old glove projects that could limit the movement each of your fingers individually to to be able to "feel" 3D objects.

But now one has popularized something like this and you would still not be able to feel the keys on your fingertips + probably some other drawbacks I'm not aware of.

But honestly I think that a physical keyboard is probably best.

A chorded keyboard built into controllers may be a solution, but (like all keyboards) has a learning curve.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorded_keyboard

Cameras/gloves that detect sign language (letters or even words) may be another solution, but has a steeper learning curve.

It seems like it should be possible to build keyboard (and other) peripherals that exist in both virtual and physical worlds. Give them sensors similar to the hand controllers, so the headset can know where they are in space, project into VR so it's easy to find and use.

VR handsets are incredibly flexible as spatial controls, but we've got all this evolution and a lifetime of learning just amazing finger dexterity. That control is based more on tactile and proprioceptive feedback than visual, so I think it's been overlooked in the vision-focused VR space.