Meta Research Turns Any Flat Surface into a Virtual Keyboard

Meta research turned any flat surface into a virtual keyboard. Mark Zuckerberg posted a video to his personal Instagram profile showing clips of himself and Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth trying a surface-locked virtual keyboard in a Quest 2 headset. Zuckerberg claims he was able to achieve around 100 words per minute, while Bosworth says he reached 119 words per minute.

The average person types at around 40 words per minute on a traditional keyboard. Whereas professional typists reach between 70 and 120 words per minute depending on their skill level.

Meta Research Turns Any Flat Surface into a Virtual Keyboard

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Text input in VR and AR today is tiring and slower than on PCs and smartphones. Floating virtual keyboards require awkwardly holding your hands up and pressing one key at a time. Quest headsets support pairing a physical Bluetooth keyboard for full-speed typing.

If future headsets could turn any flat surface into a virtual keyboard, it allow you to rest your wrists as with physical keyboards, without the need to carry around a physical keyboard. Developers can technically already build surface-locked virtual keyboards on Quest today.

Quest 3 will add a depth sensor to a Meta headset for the first time. A leaked setup clip shows the headset generating a 3D mesh of its environment. If this mesh is precise enough, Quest 3 could potentially eventually support this kind of virtual keyboard.

Meta will likely show off more of its VR and AR research at Meta Connect, which starts September 27 this year.

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