KRVR supports Apple Vision Pro focused streaming for SteamVR games

KRVR, a $15 visionOS app, lets you play any SteamVR game from your computer on Apple Vision Pro with focused streaming.

It’s not the only visionOS app to play your SteamVR games, and it’s not the first app to support Apple’s Focused Streaming feature introduced in visionOS 26.4. ALVR, available on the App Store a few months after the M2 Vision Pro launched, supports playing SteamVR games from your PC, and in March a Canadian software engineer released Clear XR, which lets you play OpenXR games from your PC. Both are free and open source, with the ALVR client available on the App Store and Clear XR available on TestFlight, both with a streaming server on GitHub.

KRVR is a paid closed-source application that, with its most recent updates, offers two of the best features of ALVR and Clear XR in one solution: it enables you to increase the display quality in the area of ​​the scene you’re currently viewing, with foveate streaming, any SteamVR game, even non-OpenXR titles.

Like Clear XR, KRVR’s developer leverages Nvidia’s CloudXR SDK, which has full out-of-the-box support for Apple’s Focused Streaming feature.

Valves Illustration of foveated streaming.

What is Focused Streaming?

Guided by eye tracking, Foveated Streaming prioritizes image resolution and compression quality where your eye is currently looking.

You may have heard it in one context Steam frame of valveIt’s a core feature of its PC VR streaming offering, delivered via a USB PC wireless adapter by default.

Note that foveated Streaming has No Same as foveated ProvidingBoth techniques can be used in conjunction with each other. Foveated rendering involves the title on the host device, literally rendering the part of each frame you’re currently viewing at high resolution, while foveated streaming means sending that part to the headset with a higher image quality than the other frames. Foveated rendering happens in the game engine, while foveated streaming is used for frames that have already been rendered.

The $15 app has a relatively polished interface and some unique features compared to ALVR, which doesn’t yet support focused streaming, and Clear XR, which hasn’t been updated since March:

  • Passing cutouts: Similar to Quest’s virtual desktop, KRVR lets you discover parts of your space, showing you a real-world passthrough instead of VR. It lets you bring your racing wheel, HOTAS, desk or other physical parts of your room into VR. You can edit these passthrough cutout zones at any time.
  • PC desktop: View and interact with your PC monitors with multiple monitor support. While playing a VR game, you can interact with your PC’s other physical monitors.

Like the ALVR and Clear XR, Sony’s PlayStation VR2 Sense Tracked controllers are fully supported, though you can also use a gamepad or other input devices like a mouse and keyboard.

The tradeoff of using Nvidia’s CloudXR SDK is that it exclusively supports Nvidia’s Ada and Blackwell GPU architectures, namely the RTX 40-series and 50-series graphics cards. The current PC I’m using has an RTX 3090, so unfortunately, I can’t test KRVR at the moment.

KRVR screenshot.

If you’ve got the necessary GPU and Apple Vision Pro and want to give it a try, you can find the KRVR visionOS client for $15 in the App Store and the Windows PC server app on GitHub — though note that the source code isn’t available.

X-Plane and iRacing recently launched their own dedicated visionOS clients for their PC VR simulators, and leverage Nvidia’s CloudXR to provide seamless automatic connection and automatic alignment of your physical devices, your HOTAS or racing wheel system, and passthrough cutout.

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