The Wide and Ultrawide modes for Mac Virtual Display have now arrived for all Apple Vision Pro owners in visionOS 2.2.
The new modes also appear to require macOS 15.2, the latest version of Apple's Mac operating system, as we weren't able to get it working on macOS 15.1.
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. Because of this, and because the experience has high quality and low latency, we strongly praised Mac Virtual Display in our review of Vision Pro.
Until visionOS 2.2 though, Mac Virtual Display was limited to a 16:9 widescreen virtual display. Now with visionOS 2.2, as Apple announced at WWDC 24 earlier this year, you can choose to expand the display to a Wide aspect ratio, or even to an enveloping panoramic Ultrawide experience. And for all three modes, Mac Virtual Display is now curved.
Apple says the ultrawide Mac Virtual Display has 10K horizontal resolution, as if you have two 5K monitors side by side. The company explained that this is made possible thanks to foveation, where eye tracking is used to prioritize resolution in the region of the screen you're currently looking at.
Further, with visionOS 2.2 the audio from your Mac is now routed to Vision Pro, whereas previously it still played through the Mac.
David Heaney
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 default approach of the third-party apps 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.
This article, originally published when visionOS 2.2 Beta released on November 4, has been updated and republished to reflect the release of visionOS 2.2 stable.
