This is the twentieth fifth part of the Availability Anywhere series. For your convenience you can find other parts in the table of contents in Part 1 – Connecting to SSH tunnel automatically in Windows
Today we’re going to make our VR experience even better. This is continuation of the previous part.
As mentioned before, there are issues with ALT+TAB and WINDOWS key. I remapped CAPS LOCK to WINDOWS with PowerToys, but today we’re doing something better.
First, I was looking for a good full-size keyboard with touchpad that I could use with VR. The best thing I found is Perixx PERIBOARD-313. Touchpad is in some weird position but I got used to that. It has this irritating Fn key, lacks Right WINDOWS, and the space is quite short, but generally the keyboard is good enough.
However, it’s a wired keyboard. You can plug that into your VR headset and it works well. The keyboard has additional USB slots, so you can plug more devices to your VR this way. Still, we’d like to make it wireless. To do that, I’m using Bluetooth Adapter for Keyboard & Mouse (BT-500). This adapter has a couple of interesting features. First, it turns your wired keyboard or mouse into a wireless one. Second, it can remap keys on the fly, add macros, or have custom settings that you can switch between easily.
I’m using the adapter to remap Left WINDOWS to CAPS LOCK, and TAB to SCROLL LOCK. This is my setup:
|
1 2 3 4 |
map add l_com caps_lock map add tab scroll_lock save reboot |
Next, I remap CAPS LOCK to Left WINDOWS back using PowerToys. I do the same for SCROLL LOCK and TAB.
Finally, I use another adapter to turn any wired mouse into wireless one. You could go with Bluetooth mouse instead. With these things in place, I now have a “regular” wireless keyboard that I can use with VR. Even though it’s Android behind the scenes, all is just like a regular Windows laptop.
As a side note, I tried remapping keys to F13 and similar special keys. Unfortunately, Quest 3 doesn’t handle these properly and my remote machine I connect to over vSpatial doesn’t receive the keys.