  Physical keyboards are common peripherals for personal computers and are
efficient standard text entry devices. Recent research has investigated how
physical keyboards can be used in immersive head-mounted display-based Virtual
Reality (VR). So far, the physical layout of keyboards has typically been
transplanted into VR for replicating typing experiences in a standard desktop
environment.
  In this paper, we explore how to fully leverage the immersiveness of VR to
change the input and output characteristics of physical keyboard interaction
within a VR environment. This allows individual physical keys to be
reconfigured to the same or different actions and visual output to be
distributed in various ways across the VR representation of the keyboard.
  We explore a set of input and output mappings for reconfiguring the virtual
presentation of physical keyboards and probe the resulting design space by
specifically designing, implementing and evaluating nine VR-relevant
applications: emojis, languages and special characters, application shortcuts,
virtual text processing macros, a window manager, a photo browser, a
whack-a-mole game, secure password entry and a virtual touch bar. We
investigate the feasibility of the applications in a user study with 20
participants and find that, among other things, they are usable in VR. We
discuss the limitations and possibilities of remapping the input and output
characteristics of physical keyboards in VR based on empirical findings and
analysis and suggest future research directions in this area.
