PC VR on Vision Pro gets closer to reality and you can actually try it out now

ALVR for Vision Pro — an open-source equivalent of VR to PC streaming apps like AirLink — now has a publicly available app. If you’re eager, you can check it out for yourself via TestFlight — Apple’s variant of Meta’s App Lab.

In the past, checking ALVR out required a bit of technical knowledge that not every user had a background for. Now, thanks to the app, the process is a lot easier. That being said, the real question here is: how stable and useful is the app, given that the Vision Pro still lacks dedicated controllers?

If you’re here, then you’ve likely dabbled in a bit of VR gaming. With almost every game release — PC VR games included — the required input method is more elaborate than hand tracking alone. As it was in the past: the real Vision Pro and PC VR battle is reliant on getting the system to work with third-party controllers. At least until Apple releases its own, dedicated variant.



Zhuowei Zhang was initially responsible for porting ALVR over to visionOS. In recent months, however, programmer Max Thomas lent a hand with optimizing the project’s code. Thanks to that, now the app has the following improvements:


As you may have guessed, based on the last two entries on the list, this meaningful update still doesn’t solve the idea’s main issue: the need for controllers. The good news is that if you have controllers such as the Nintendo Switch’s Joy-Cons, you can connect those to SteamVR and utilize them.

This, in turn, leads to an imperfect — and hopefully temporary — solution, where ALVR conveys the Vision Pro’s hand tracking data and SteamVR takes the Joy-Con’s inputs. The two, in a somewhat awkward, yet functional way, make for a complete controller. That being said, we have not tested the solution ourselves, so we can’t speak to how well the combo actually works. We’re expecting accuracy to be negatively impacted.