It's curious that Optikey was posted today, because yesterday I wrote a post about the promise of iris scanning technology to deliver a seamless payments experience in VR headsets.

Unfortunately, none of the VR headsets shipping in the next six months have iris trackers (much less scanners). The only headset I found was Fove, which was successfully kickstarted and ships in 2016. Fove did a promotion with a Japanese school for wheelchair-bound children, in which a child played a piano using the iris tracking function of the headset.

There are some iris scanner-equipped phones shipping in the near future, but none with iris trackers as far as I could tell.

I can share the post link if people are interested.

Was thinking the same thing. The inevitable trend with VR is that it gets miniaturized to slimline eyewear, contact lenses, or embedded directly wetwear.

As it progresses, input devices will need to evolve quite a bit since it won't always be convenient to have a full-size keyboard, and part of the value of having a screen on your eyes vs. in your hand is that it frees up your hands for other things. Being able to use slight muscle gestures (ala "Rainbow's End" by Vernor Vinge) in combination with eye-tracking, audio controls, etc. seems like a logical leap until we can decode brainwaves sufficiently to use that as input.

I imagine something that shows a swipe-style keyboard overlaid on screen with your current finger position is also a likely solution.

That said, my big beef with this seems to be forcing a traditional keyboard layout on screen that takes up a massive amount of screen real estate. Would much prefer thinking outside of the traditional keyboard layout and making better use of space.