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!

But why does it matter if you "cheat"? That makes no sense. If you can type 95 wpm using keys with letters on them, then that's all that matters. Your goal is to be able to type effectively, not to type with a handicap.