There is a very cool project that has been in development over the last few weeks, and, in my opinion, is getting far less visibility than it deserves: OpenXR OSX, a solution for playing PCVR games on Mac.
VR support on Mac
The support of virtual reality on Mac has always been, to say the least, troubled. In the beginning, Mac was compatible with the early Oculus runtimes, but this compatibility was soon discontinued. 7-8 years ago, Mac started supporting HTC Vive headsets with a bulky external adapter…. it was not the ideal solution, but it worked. After a while, that support was dropped, too, and people wanting to do proper PCVR had to resort to buying a Windows PC.
Even though the last few Mac generations feature the very high-performance M-series chips, macOS still lacks compatibility with VR headsets, and this is a real pity. And even if now there are various streaming solutions that would allow for a standalone headset to loosely connect to a Mac laptop, the big problem is that Apple never entered the OpenXR consortium, so all available PCVR apps can’t run on MacOS anyway.
But a new project is trying to fix this situation…
OpenXR OSX
OpenXR OSX is a full solution to let you run OpenXR applications (i.e., PCVR games) on your Mac and then enjoy them on your standalone headset. It is being developed by Yannick Comte, a long-time VR developer, who is very well known in our communities.
It features:
- An OpenXR runtime for MacOS. It is basically a sort of barebones “SteamVR for MacOS”. This allows any application compiled for Mac with the OpenXR SDK to be run on Mac
- A thin client to install on your standalone headset so that it can stream content from the OpenXR runtime. Imagine this like a barebones Virtual Desktop. There is, for now, a client available for Quest 2/3, and one for Vision Pro, but the Vision Pro one has not been fully tested yet (actually, it has been tested on the simulator, and some small issues have been found)
- A simulator for MacOS, so that you can test your OpenXR application on Mac even when you are not wearing a headset
Basically, it works this way: you install and launch the runtime on your Mac, then launch the thin client on your Quest headset, and in the end, you launch the OpenXR application on your Mac. And voilà, you can play PCVR games on your Mac! It’s pretty user-friendly, also because the client on your headset automatically finds the OpenXR runtime on Mac and connects to it without you needing to do anything.
It currently supports both hand tracking and controllers.
The problems
Being a challenging project being developed by a single person, it currently has its own share of issues:
- The latency is not perfect, and there is some visible lag. Yannick is considering forking an existing working streaming solution like ALVR to improve performance, but ALVR is not OpenXR compatible, and porting it from OpenVR to OpenXR could be an overwhelming task.
- Launching the PCVR applications on Mac currently requires using some command-line magic to point them to the OpenXR loader to use. This can be fixed in the future with a visual app that acts as a launcher of the games you have installed on your Mac, but someone has to build this app.
- It does not support USB tethered connection but only Wi-Fi. Yannick hopes the dev community can help him in fixing the issues of tethering streaming in the upcoming times.
What is not a problem, instead, is the performance: Yannick tested his runtime with pretty heavy VR scenes, and he reports that the Mac was able to handle them very well, and rendering was fluid. His test happened with an M5 GPU, so he advises using this system with a Mac mounting an M-series chipset.
Release date
While Yannick has shared plenty of content about it on social media, OpenXR OSX has not been released yet. It should release “soon”, which may mean tomorrow or in two years, if we follow Valve’s standards. Most probably, it will be released as open source in May.
Being open source, you will be able to contribute to it and help it solve the problems listed above. You can reach out to Yannick Comte on X or LinkedIn to see how you can be of help.
Final considerations
I’m personally a big fan of OpenXR OSX because it finally completes the vision of OpenXR. OpenXR was built to guarantee full compatibility of content across devices, but the fact that Apple never adopted it meant that PCVR applications could never be enjoyed by Mac users. Now, with this project, finally, an OpenXR PC application can be run on Windows (SteamVR or Quest Link), Linux (Monado), and MacOS (OpenXR OSX).
This is a new project, though, and currently handled by only one person, so it is not perfect at all. But I believe that if a small community of people and/or companies starts contributing to it, all the most prominent bugs could be solved. And this would finally lead to having proper PCVR on Mac. Yannick would be very happy to build a community around it, and I really hope this is going to happen, too.
(Header image by Yannick Comte)