Vision Pro with a Windows laptop?

[ddvmor]

Vision Pro with a Macbook looks great, especially with the massive widescreen in OS2. But has anyone tried working with a windows machine - are there good apps tgat do the same thing? How’s the workflow?

I’ve used ‘Immersed’ on Meta Quest 3, but it’s quite janky, laggy and drops the connection every now and again.

For context, I currently do animation and video editing on Adobe apps, and a little bit of gaming - mostly city builders and the like. Lots of staring at minute, fine details.

I’m on the fence about buying an AVP and this is one of the things that might swing it for me.

 

[Macaholic868]

I use Windows on my work PC and if you can sign up for the Microsoft Remote Desktop Beta that app now works on the Vision Pro so I’m able to use OpenVPN to connect to my work’s network then the Remote Desktop app on the Vision Pro and it works well enough with a keyboard and the Magic Trackpad (pre visionOS 2.0 beta) or a wireless mouse (visionOS 2.0 beta) for me to get work done.

In terms of connecting it directly to a PC on your network, if you configured RDP and properly configured the Windows Firewall or whatever software firewall you use you could then use the RDP app to log into that but obviously using RDP is a different experiencing than using the AVP as a virtual monitor / screen mirror.

I did a quick search and found this. Apparently you can use the AVP in a very similar manner in Windows to the way that you can with a Mac. I haven’t tried it personally but have a look. I think it shows what you’re looking for if your PC or laptop has the right kind of port for it. I’m sure there are other solutions out there if your PC or laptop doesn’t.

 

[TLewis]

If you can use the keyboard and mouse attached to the PC, sunshine (on the PC) and moonlight (iPad version, on the AVP) allows you to put a huge display inside the AVP. The key is to use the same resolution at the sunshine (same as your PC's monitor) and moonlight ends; any upscaling or downscaling may result in a blurry display. For gaming, there is a tiny amount of lag, but sunshine/moonshine is supposed to be one of the lowest-latency solutions.

Edit: if your monitor is tiny, you can supposedly create a much larger virtual monitor on your PC for sunshine/moonlight to use, but the instructions seem complicated (it's much easier if you already have a big monitor): https://www.reddit.com/r/VisionPro/comments/1az87zx (I don't think that testflight moonlight is available any more -- the iPad version should be usable but you will be restricted to using the keyboard and mouse attached to the PC)


(A native AVP version of moonlight is supposedly coming, but that's been said for months. Best not to wait for it.)

Also, another alternative is to use a hardware NDI encoder ($$$$) to convert HDMI from your PC/laptop for display on your AVP: https://gist.github.com/KhaosT/e9b60fc0fb99b9f4512759b953cbf38c (a much cheaper alternative is listed here, but I've never been able to get that to work).

Edit 2: there is one "gotcha" with moonlight, although this is really a Vision OS issue: if you use 5GHz wifi, the AVP constantly switches between channel 149 (for AWDL -- Apple Wireless Direct Link) and whatever channel you normally use for 5GHz. This causes moonlight to occasionally stutter. The fix is to have the AVP use channel 149 for 5GHz wifi so that there is no switching.

 

[-narcan-]

Yeah I tried using 'Screens 3' which works over VNC, and it was awful. Really janky screen movement etc. This was a modern PC (7800x3d, 4070 super etc) over ethernet.

Compared to Mac Virtual Desktop which is flawless.