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Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

I see a lot of assumptions about office worker productivity with zero real world evidence.

A lot of home office workers never learned to touch type. How the heck are they supposed to do office work if they can't see their fingers on the keyboard? Voice recognition is no solution, it still sucks for text entry and is completely useless for anything like slide presentations or spreadsheets.

There is legitimate potential for workers doing 3D stuff like CAD, architecture, and data visualization but that's a tiny niche of the workforce.

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Like others said, occluding the keyboard into VR is suprisingly capable, especially when combined with touch typing.

Also most CAD users would probably not want cludgy UI like VR has today, they want keyboard and mouse too.

I suggest looking at the demo/videos of Horizon Workspace (by meta). It works really well, although the resolution is too low for me tooday.

Then there is this guy that was on HN recently:

https://blog.immersed.team/working-from-orbit-39bf95a6d385

> How the heck are they supposed to do office work if they can't see their fingers on the keyboard?

I have seen a video, IIRC it was from SimulaVR, in which the user had a virtual window which showed a camera view facing the real-world keyboard. So this is easy to solve: these people who need to see their fingers on the keyboard (and probably everyone else when doing a real-world action like getting a cup with a drink) would open a window with an external camera view.

You’ll be able to see your fingers and arms and keyboard/mouse/trackpd/desk surface/chair all in vr. Even current gen oculus has a front facing camera.

How is touch typing (or lack of it) related to working in a home office?

Most office work that I’ve seen requires text entry (email, spreadsheets, proposals, etc) and that’s always today done through a keyboard. Doing that work in VR where you can’t see the keyboard is surprisingly tough, even if you can touch type!

I’ve switched out my keycaps for blanks recently to try to force myself to get better at working in VR but I’m still struggling a bit with all the symbols.

Luckily, tracking your physical keyboard in VR has already been a thing for a while, and it has both quite solid third-party[0] and first-party implementations[1] by now.

To clarify, when I say "tracking", I don't mean just being able to use your keyboard in VR. I mean being able to actually see your keyboard in VR, along with being able to see keycaps on the virtual representation of your keyboard.

0. https://uploadvr.com/immersed-real-keyboard-support/

1. https://www.cnet.com/tech/gaming/typing-in-vr-how-to-connect...

Bringing physical keyboards and other peripherals into VR is just a matter of time though. There’s already a lot of experiments doing exactly that.

When I was in college with a time-sharing system, someone as a joke removed all the keycaps from one of the CRTs. Didn't stop me, I'm a good enough touch typist that I just sat down and started using it.

Good typing skills are a super-power in today's world.

These days in Teams it will tell you when someone's typing. It amazes me how long people need to type just to get a simple point across.

Why can't you have printed keycaps in VR?

I switched out keycaps IRL, not in VR. The idea was that, not being able to cheat by looking down would help improve my typing faster by forcing me to memorize the keys better. I’ve only gone from mid-50s wpm to now about 60ish but it’s helped more with the uncommon keys that don’t move the average as much. It’s those uncommon keys that kill me in VR though so it feels like a bigger bump.

about 20 years ago I was using the kde application Ktouch to learn touch typing.. it was highly effective compared to the competition of the time. Give it a try!

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