Apple's Vision Pro headset holds the promise to be a powerful extension of your Mac workflow, but the Mac integration it shipped with is just neat, not a big step forward. Now, an app by established independent developers Jordi Bruin, Mathijs Kadijk, and Tom Lokhorst aims to fix that.
Called Splitscreen, it enables you to use two virtual displays at once while working with your Mac and wearing Vision Pro. By contrast, Apple's default implementation only supports mirroring a single Mac display to a resizable virtual one.
Further, the developers are working on achieving what I said I'd like to see from Apple when I wrote up my first impressions of the headset: the ability to move individual Mac windows around your space freely like visionOS apps when your Mac and Vision Pro are connected to one another.
That feature is definitely not here yet, but I tested the dual-display functionality during my workday today to see how it held up.
So far, it helps to illustrate how much of a bummer it is that the Vision Pro doesn't already do this—but it also might give us a glimpse at why Apple hasn't tried it yet.
Some quick background
I already use some of Bruin's apps in my daily life. I've dabbled with Vivid, an app that allows you to unlock the maximum brightness of a modern MacBook for general desktop use. That brightness is normally reserved for highlights in HDR media. It's not an everyday app for me, but it's helpful in the occasional instances when I'm trying to work in the sunlight.
AdvertisementBut I've been using MacGPT, a local client for OpenAI's ChatGPT, countless times every day since it first launched. As such, I was on Bruin's email list, and I got an email announcing Splitscreen's availability.
A few weeks back, I spent several days working exclusively inside Vision Pro and wrote an article about it. At that time, I said that while the ability to mirror your Mac display in the Vision Pro was cool, the real dream would be to create arrays of multiple displays.
That's exactly what Bruin's email about Splitscreen said it did, so I took it for a spin.
Setup
To use Splitscreen, you have to download and install it on both your Mac and your Vision Pro. After you download it on one device, it gives you an easy-to-access link to download it on the other.
Once that's done, it will become a Menu Bar item on your Mac while running. You'll need to launch the app on the Vision Pro to start. While they're both open, you can click the Splitscreen Menu Bar icon and select the Vision Pro headset you want to connect to.
- When you first install the visionOS app, you can AirDrop the Mac App Store link to your Mac.Samuel Axon
- You have to connect through Apple's normal Connect interface first, then do the Splitscreen one.
- You just click a Menu Bar item to make the connection to Splitscreen.Samuel Axon
If that's all you do, it does exactly what Apple's Mac desktop feature does: it mirrors your computer's primary display to a spatial virtual display. The only difference is that it leaves the Mac display on. (With Apple's implementation, your MacBook display turns off as soon as you start mirroring, leaving you with just the virtual display.)
However, if you first launch Apple's desktop mirroring and then use the Splitscreen Menu Bar option, it will create a second virtual display that extends your primary Mac display, so you have two spatial displays to work with.
How well it works
There's a nicely designed interface for letting the OS know where the displays are relative to one another, which you need since you can place spatial windows anywhere, and you need to move the mouse cursor between them consistently. It's certainly as good as it can be for expressing 3D spatial relationships in a 2D app, though you may have to revisit it if you move the spatial windows.
Of course, that all just works automatically with visionOS apps and Apple's own mirrored display. The developers seem to be working around some limitations in what Apple is giving them here.
Once that's set up, you'll see two displays that behave as they should. I could move windows between them freely and use them just like two external monitors, but I could also resize them and move them around, as is the promise of the Vision Pro.
There are three default performance settings that tweak things like resolution, bitrate, and framerate: low, medium, and high. Even the highest setting caps the framerate at 30 fps. To me, 30 fps is a deal-breaker for most uses, but it's admittedly all happening over Wi-Fi, so it is what it is.
- You can let your Mac know how to handle cursor behavior with this panel, which works as well as a 2D representation of 3D space can.Samuel Axon
- There's a view built into the Splitscreen visionOS app for managing your quality settings and performance. It needs it, because it can be hairy.Samuel Axon
I live in a railroad apartment with my router in the front, and my office midway back in a separate room. (I tried a mesh Wi-Fi for a while, and it didn't work for me.) I had to move into the same room as my router at the front of the apartment to be able to crank it up manually to 60 fps by tweaking a custom display preset, which the app fully supports.
AdvertisementEven then, there was noticeable input lag with my cursor on the Splitscreen virtual display, which is something I don't experience on the one using Apple's mirroring (even in my office). It was far from ideal, but it was just barely good enough.
I'm not knocking the team behind this app; they've done something remarkable while clearly working within some real limitations and barriers.
A glimpse at what could be
I worked with Splitscreen for much of the day, but I had to be thoughtful about which apps to put in which display. I kept stuff I was constantly using as my main focus in the Apple spatial display and put things I only accessed occasionally, like notes or Slack, in the laggier Splitscreen one.
Obviously, your mileage could vary depending on the network situation in your home. Even though I was in the same room as my router, it's not a particularly high-end router, and I live in a dense urban neighborhood, so there were competing signals muddying things.
It's the same reason in-home video game streaming only makes sense in my home for games like Civilization that don't require a lot of reflexes or movement. People tell me those same streaming apps work great in their homes for action games, and I believe them. I've never been able to get performance from them in any apartment, so I assume I'd need to be in a single-family home without 10-plus other Wi-Fi signals around. (And yes, I've switched to the least-crowded channel.)
Regardless, I still found Splitscreen useful, even with the limitations of my home network.
It did make me wonder why Apple didn't do this to begin with, but I'm guessing the responsiveness might have been part of that decision. Splitscreen is handy if you're not picky about performance, but it's not the full solution yet. Still, I'm impressed with how much the developers were able to do, and it makes me really want a more robust implementation with Apple's full support.
