Chat function in VR mode

[ducile]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. For bigger meetups via Hubs it would be important to be able to pin chat messages in case of questions that might be pushed away quickly by other messages or just the ability to join discussions in Discord while being in VR. In addition, the chat also allows to trigger in chat features like /fly. Currently it's only possible to reach the chat by exiting the VR mode manually and then use the 2D browser mode to write messages (tested on Oculus Quest).

Describe the solution you'd like Having a translucent chat box in the lower part of the FOV that follows the movement. When you look down the chat box becomes more visible and allows to enter messages, pin them with the magic wand button, or trigger in-chat features.

Describe alternatives you've considered An alternative would be to create a button that opens the chat box and having several buttons that trigger the in-chat features.

Additional context It would be great to have this feature for the upcoming conference in October where we use Hubs rooms as the remote attendance platform.

┆Issue is synchronized with this Jira Task

[misslivirose]

Dependent on keyboard support - we'd like to hold on this until we have a better sense if future work will allow us to use browser keyboards for sites, or if we have to build a separate one. We could also consider popping back to non-immersive browser mode, but needs significant design work to do full parity with desktop/mobile chat.

[V0L4T1LE]

From a user perspective, I would propose that chat should be a widget you can summon and dismiss (possibly connected to your non-dominant wrist) and instead of a keyboard interface, it should simply have a button for "voice to text" entry. There are some brilliant solutions for the voice to text engine out there.

[gfodor]

Voice to text is interesting - however it does lead to the question of if you are going to say it out loud anyway, why use chat instead of just speaking? I think there are some examples, but they don’t seem common enough to warrant the effort involved to implement this. Is there a clear killer use case for it I’m not thinking of?

On Thu, Mar 26, 2020 at 9:11 PM Brad Nisbet notifications@github.com wrote:

From a user perspective, I would propose that chat should be a widget you can summon and dismiss (possibly connected to your non-dominant wrist) and instead of a keyboard interface, it should simply have a button for "voice to text" entry. There are some brilliant solutions for the voice to text engine out there.

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[gfodor]

Actually i guess being able to spawn them is a clear one. So we might want to work that problem specifically, unless there are others.

On Fri, Mar 27, 2020 at 7:06 AM Greg Fodor gfodor@gmail.com wrote:

Voice to text is interesting - however it does lead to the question of if you are going to say it out loud anyway, why use chat instead of just speaking? I think there are some examples, but they don’t seem common enough to warrant the effort involved to implement this. Is there a clear killer use case for it I’m not thinking of?

On Thu, Mar 26, 2020 at 9:11 PM Brad Nisbet notifications@github.com wrote:

From a user perspective, I would propose that chat should be a widget you can summon and dismiss (possibly connected to your non-dominant wrist) and instead of a keyboard interface, it should simply have a button for "voice to text" entry. There are some brilliant solutions for the voice to text engine out there.

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[V0L4T1LE]

Voice to text as input isn't about the sender it's about the recieved. There are many situations a user might not be able to have audio functionality and the chat option is useful to them (although a virtual keyboard would function as well but i find all current implementations of VR keyboards to be lacking compared to voice to text input).

Reasons you might want to be able to read text log of voice comms:

Unable to have audio due to shared work environment, deaf and hearing impaired, communication that isn't interupting the main speaker during a conference or presentation, etc

However, the spawnable chat widget would make me happy enough even if in VR i can only read/view and not type.

[gfodor]

Ah that makes sense, hadn’t considered the accessibility implications- thanks!

On Fri, Mar 27, 2020 at 8:34 AM Brad Nisbet notifications@github.com wrote:

Voice to text as input isn't about the sender it's about the recieved. There are many situations a user might not be able to have audio functionality and the chat option is useful to them (although a virtual keyboard would function as well but i find all current implementations of VR keyboards to be lacking compared to voice to text input).

Reasons you might want to be able to read text log of voice comms:

Unable to have audio due to shared work environment, deaf and hearing impaired, communication that isn't interupting the main speaker during a conference or presentation, etc

However, the spawnable chat widget would make me happy enough even if in VR i can only read/view and not type.

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[elmau]

I think this could be solved by using T9 predictive text, so you can make a small widget with a keypad.