iRacing Joins X-Plane 12 In Streaming High-End Simulation To Apple Vision Pro: What About Mac Support?
Dual announcements from iRacing and X-Plane point to a big moment for fans of high-end simulation coming to Apple headsets.
From the iRacing website:
iRacing is pleased to share that through a collaboration with Apple and NVIDIA, the world’s premier motorsport simulation will be available on Apple Vision Pro later this spring with the release of visionOS 26.4 and NVIDIA’s CloudXR 6.0 streaming platform…
Apple Vision Pro delivers a uniquely immersive sim racing experience by seamlessly blending your racing rig with the virtual cockpit, aligning your physical steering wheel with the one in-game. iRacers see their physical hands on the wheel, producing an unparalleled experience that ensures racers remain visually connected to their racing rig while using Apple Vision Pro.
The announcement parallels an earlier one for X-Plane, a high-end flight simulator, with similar language in their announcement:
By leveraging image detection through ARKit, the sim can reliably track cockpit positions, allowing you to seamlessly merge the physical and digital worlds.
The announcements praise the involvement of both Apple and NVIDIA, even though Apple’s role is framed as secondary to NVIDIA’s. In that X-Plane announcement, for example, it indicates streaming from a “PC equipped with NVIDIA’s RTX GPU” and I had to confirm over email they meant a local device rather than a “cloud” one.
X-Plane is sold for Mac as well as PC, but it is not sold through the Mac App Store, and iRacing isn’t available for Mac at all. In either case, Apple isn’t profiting from the sale of some of the most expensive and well-loved simulation software about to be used with its spatial computing platform. That doesn’t sound very Apple-like, does it?
My original report about foveated streaming coming in visionOS 26.4 noted the split-rendering example Apple gave for this functionality:
“Foveated Streaming enables visionOS apps to display high-resolution, low-latency immersive content from streaming endpoints,” Apple’s documentation explains. “On Apple Vision Pro, Foveated Streaming allows you to display visionOS spatial content alongside streaming content. For example, a flight simulator app can render a cockpit using RealityKit, and stream a processor-intensive landscape from a remote computer to the device.”
This level of alignment between physical and virtual content, plus the technical complexity of split rendering, is practically unheard of in VR. Alignment typically requires extraordinary expense and time to deliver and most of the solutions fall short of what’s promised here without robust end-to-end platform support. To my knowledge, only Varjo has even attempted anything like this with the same degree of quality and immersion, and their headsets can be far more expensive than the Vision Pro.
Even close watchers of the VR industry don’t quite understand the implications of what Apple might do here for high-end simulation.
High Frame Rates Can Raise The Bar For Comfort In Simulation
Since 2016, with both the Rift and Vive headsets, 90 frames per second has been set as the bare minimum for comfort in VR.
Valve, with its open PC culture, didn’t restrict developers, instead allowing them to set their own minimum and recommend specifications for what the developer deems is a good experience. That’s changing with the coming Steam Frame, with Valve now requiring 90 frames per second for verification of comfort in standalone.
To enable Meta’s mad rush into standalone VR on cell phone-class chips from about 2019 — and to try to fork some developers away from PCs and Valve — the entire industry has been warped by Mark Zuckerberg’s spending into using a variety of tricks to produce comfortable frame rates for VR. Meta declares 72 FPS as the minimum rate on Quest standalone and also allows developers to deploy an array of solutions to essentially drop below that minimum, quite a bit in some instances, and then warp the scene or simulate missing frames to meet that lower rate for delivering a sense of comfort.
