visionOS 2.2 Beta Brings Ultrawide Mac Virtual Display

The Wide and Ultrawide modes for Mac Virtual Display announced by Apple back in June have now arrived in the first visionOS 2.2 Beta.

The new modes also appear to require macOS 15.2 Beta, the latest beta version of Apple’s Mac operating system, as we weren’t able to get it working on macOS 15.1.

How To Opt In To visionOS Betas

To enable downloading beta Apple operating systems you just need to sign in with your Apple ID on the Apple Developer Center website at least once. You don’t need to join the paid Apple Developer Program, but you will need to accept the terms of the Apple Developer Agreement.

You then navigate to Settings -> General -> Software Update -> Beta Updates in your headset and select “visionOS Developer Beta”.

Note that installing a beta version of an operating system is only recommended if you’re willing to accept bugs, instability, and the small chance it could put your device in a state requiring a factory reset. Some apps may even stop working. In exchange, you’ll get to try out the new features and improvements in advance.

Since launch, Apple Vision Pro has been able to replace your physical Mac screen with a giant virtual display. To do so, you just look at your MacBook and click a floating virtual button that appears, or use Control Center for a desktop Mac. Apple’s software then almost instantly creates a direct wireless connection between the headset and Mac, meaning you don’t even need a Wi-Fi network, and if you are on one you won’t suffer from any congestion issues. For these reasons, and because the experience has high quality and low latency, we strongly praised Mac Virtual Display in our review of Vision Pro.

Until now though, Mac Virtual Display has been limited to a 16:9 widescreen 4K virtual display. With visionOS 2.2, as Apple announced at WWDC 24 earlier this year, you can choose to expand the display to a wider aspect ratio, or even to an enveloping panoramic ultrawide experience.

Apple says the ultrawide Mac Virtual Display has 8K horizontal resolution, as if you have two 4K monitors side by side. The company explained that this is made possible by the use of foveation, where eye tracking is used to prioritize resolution to the region of the screen you’re currently looking at.

Apple’s wide and ultrawide Mac Virtual Display modes are a different take on the PC monitor extension approach than what we’ve seen from Meta and Microsoft, as well as the third-party apps on Quest and other competing headsets such as Immersed and Virtual Desktop. Those solutions give you virtual extra side monitors, including gaps between them and your virtualized physical monitor, while Apple’s approach expands the single virtual display into a similarly wide area, but without the gaps.

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