With visionOS 2, Apple Vision Pro supports room-scale VR

Apple Vision Pro can support room-scale VR with visionOS 2, showing only your real floor as you walk.

In our Vision Pro review, we pointed out that it doesn’t really support room-scale VR. Instead of having a user-defined or suggested safety boundary like Meta Quest or SteamVR, by default visionOS 1 simply places you in a 3×3 meter circular VR bubble centered on your starting position. As you approach the edge, your view becomes more transparent, until it disappears completely. This is called Full Mode, and in visionOS 1, it’s the only practical mode developers can use for VR.

Another mode available to developers is mixed mode. In visionOS 1, this technically allowed unlimited VR, but disappeared while you were walking, so was not practical in practice. But visionOS 2 only displays that relay on your floor, keeping the rest of the scene entirely virtual.

Max Thomas, the lead developer of the visionOS port of the ALVR streaming app SteamVR, has already implemented mixed mode, which the app will now use when running on visionOS 2. He provided UploadVR with the clip above on showing working in Beat Saber as manifestation.

The new Mixed Mode behavior also opens up the possibility of room-scale VR in native Vision Pro titles, not just streamed from a PC.

The Job Simulator game, for example, offers three versions of each level on most other headsets: small, medium, and large. The appropriate size is loaded based on your limit size. But on Vision Pro, only the small size is included. Developer Owlchemy Labs tells UploadVR that the visionOS 2 change is “interesting,” and once Unity adds support for visionOS 2, they plan to “test a number of features.”