Researchers demonstrate fast typing on any surfaces with Quest 3
Researchers at Meta Reality Labs and ETH Zurich have developed a software for Quest 3 that turns any surface into a virtual keyboard.
The software is called TouchInsight and the scientific paper is freely available on Arxiv.
"In this paper, we present a real-time pipeline that detects touch input from all ten fingers on any physical surface, purely based on egocentric hand tracking. Our method TouchInsight comprises a neural network to predict the moment of a touch event, the finger making contact, and the touch location."
How many words per minute (WPM) can you type with it, and what is the error rate? Below are the results of a 12-person study, including comparisons with other types of keyboarding:
- Floating virtual Quest keyboard (average): WPM ≈ 20, error rate 8 percent
- TouchInsight (average): WPM = 37, error rate 2.9 percent
- Smartphone typing (average): WPM ≈ 36, error rate 2.3 percent (see study with 37,000 participants)
- Physical keyboard (average): WPM ≈ 40 - 60, error rate 2 - 3 percent
TouchInsight would be a big win for Meta Quest
The numbers suggest that TouchInsight would be a significant improvement over the current Quest keyboard, and roughly on par with smartphone typing in terms of word count and accuracy.
The researchers' achievement is to have developed a robust system that runs on Quest 3 and, unlike previous Meta research, does not require external markers for calibration. Unfortunately, we do not know if and when this software will find its way to Meta Quest, but it certainly would be a great feature.
The TouchInsight paper is available online.
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