Rumors surfaced late last year that Apple was looking to finally add VR motion controllers to Vision Pro, albeit through an unusual collaboration with Sony to support PSVR 2’s Sense Controllers. Now, 9to5Mac reports that the project is still on track, and official news could come as early as next week.

The report states that not only is visionOS slated to add official support for PSVR 2’s Sense Controllers, but also PlayStation and Xbox gamepads.

9to5Mac wasn’t able to confirm whether the controller update will definitely be announced at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) next week, or rather later in the year, however the Cupertino tech giant is set to announce changes coming to visionOS 26 at WWDC—a notable naming shift also set to affect macOS and iOS.

Hideo Kojima wearing Apple Vision Pro | generative extend based on an image courtesy Hideo Kojima

Vision Pro has presented a unique challenge to VR developers since the mixed reality headset’s February 2024 launch. The $3,500 XR device currently only supports hand-tracking and Bluetooth accessories, such as traditional gamepads, keyboards, and headphones, forcing XR studios to either start new projects, or retroactively add hand-tracking to existing games.

That doesn’t always make sense, as many games are specifically designed around motion controllers. Essentially, this could set the stage for more games, both traditional and XR, to launch on Vision Pro’s App Store.

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That said, adding PSVR 2 controllers to Vision Pro likely won’t be a massive sales driver of the admittedly pricey headset, which has largely been couched as a spatial computer instead of a game console. It is however a sign that Apple may finally be ready to fully embrace motion controllers in cheaper versions of the headset in the future though.

This follows a series of reports from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, which claim Apple approached Sony in early 2024 to officially integrate PSVR 2’s controllers. Notably, Apple confirmed only a few months prior to the reported talks that it had no plans to make or support VR controllers.

We’ll of course be following the big keynote, which kicks off on Monday, June 9th at 10 AM PT (local time here). You can follow along with us by tuning into Apple’s YouTube Channel.

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Scott Hayden
Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 4,000 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • Andrew Jakobs

    Nice and all it supports PSVR2 controllers, but you can't buy them separate, except used. At least I don't see them on the platstation store or any store which sells psvr2.

    • polysix

      You stupid twot. If this goes ahead of course they'll sell them seperately.

      • Arno van Wingerde

        Exactly, but even if they would not: $400 for 2 controllers is an absolute steal for AVP owners!

        • Andrew Jakobs

          Yeah, 'steal'… But then again, Valve Index controllers or the meta pro controllers sold separately are also pretty pricey.

          • XRC

            Valve Index controller are £139 each with free shipping to my UK address, and two years warranty (very important) which seems very reasonable

            HTC didn't bother updating the Vive controller for lighthouse as they couldn't compete on cost with the index controllers.

          • Andrew Jakobs

            Yeah, each, so £278/€299 for both.

      • Andrew Jakobs

        Who says, there has been no mention of it yet? Maybe they just add support for users who already have a PSVR2. But we'll see.

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      AVP support for PSVR2 Sense controllers has been rumored for some months, with the first reports saying that Sony and Apple had already been working on it for months and it being almost ready. The same sources said that Apple would start selling PSVR2 Sense controllers in Apple Stores that already sell PS5 DualSense controllers for use with Apple Arcade on iOS/iPadOS/visionOS/MacOS/TV OS, and pointed out that this might be a boon for PSVR2 owners, as this would be the first time that the PSVR2 Sense controllers would be sold separately.

      • STL

        I very much hope you are right! I sold my PSVR2 a year ago, since I found it useless.

  • STL

    Okay, let’s consider the AVP as a PCVR headset. Does it support Wi-Fi 7 for maximum data transfer? What FOV can be used horizontally and vertically? How long does the battery last? Does Virtual Desktop run on it?
    To make it short: there is small to none advantage of an AVP against a Quest 3.

    • sfmike

      Except visual quality due to the two micro-OLED displays, each with a resolution of 3660 x 3200 pixels. That's a big deal and enhances anything you do on the AVP.

      • STL

        I should have expect such a comment. The higher resolution could be a benefit, but with Wifi-6E only, how do I get the data to the AVP? I‘m not willing to consider a cable as a valid alternative.
        But I fully agree on the OLED part. That’s a true advantage.

        • Christian Schildwaechter

          Wifi bandwidth hasn't been the main issue for VR streaming for years, most of the time is spent with encoding and decoding the video signal. Even a WiFi 6 connection mostly idles between short bursts of individual frames being sent, with the main benefit of faster WiFi versions a tiny reduction in latency. Technically you can stream VR over USB 2 at 0.48Gbit/s. Wifi 5 offers up to 6.9GBit/sec, Wifi 6/6e up to 9.6Gbit/s, Wiki 7 up to 24GBit/s.

          You'll never reach these speeds in reality, but in theory you could serve several PCVR streams in parallel and still wouldn't get anywhere close to saturating the bandwidth. And you cannot crank up the video quality to use more of the bandwidths because this again will increase the decoding time on the headset, which is already the slowest part.

          Of course you'll be forced to enlarge the video stream when targeting AVP with a much higher resolution, but Apple Silicon, with a heavy design emphasis on video editing with Final Cut etc., has much more powerful video en-/decoders than Qualcomm. While Snapdragon/XR2 SoC are limited to 8K video, Blackmagic enables live editing footage from their 17K cameras in Davinci on M-series MacBooks, so AVP based on M2 should also be rather good at decoding large stream. Still not good enough to saturate even Wifi 6, but good for at least four time the pixel resolution of Quest 3.

          • STL

            I bought a high-quality Wi-Fi 6 router for my Quest 3, but it was practically useless due to constant lag. Then I switched to a budget-friendly Wi-Fi 6E router, and the connection was flawless. Theory is great, but it often has little to do with real-world performance. I‘m not dealing with written protocol descriptions but with the specific implementation of Quest 3 and Virtual Desktop.

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            The difference between Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6e isn't a change in protocol, channels, antennas or something similar, but adding the 6GHz band to the 5Ghz and 2.4GHz bands used in previous versions, with 2.4GHz also used by bluetooth, all kinds of proprietary wireless remotes and microwaves, and 5Ghz getting crowded in some areas.

            The 5GHz bands also allow for about twice the max speed of 2.4GHz, but If you are living in a shack in the woods, all of them would be fine for PCVR. That switching from Wi-Fi 6 to Wi-Fi 6e even with a cheaper router improved latency for you very likely means that you do not live in the woods, but instead in an area with lots of interference/collisions on the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands from existing routers/devices, while 6GHz is still mostly free. This mirrors the situation from a few years ago, when 5GHz was first introduced and provided a lot of improvements just by not already being overcrowded. By now almost everyone has switched to 5GHz capable routers, so the issue just moved upwards, and in a couple of years the same might happen with 6GHz.

            WiFi reception comes with a a certain level of Voodoo thanks to interference, collisions and signal blocking. I live in a very crowded area with dozens of WLAN SSIDs visible at all times plus lot of bluetooth devices and microwaves on 2.4GHz. Consequently only the 5GHz band is mostly usable. But the building also has very thick concrete walls with a lot of rebar, and inside my bathroom, which is about 4m from the router, the 5GHz band often completely breaks down and I have to switch back to 2.4GHz. I've worked in an office where the connection worked fine after the initial connection was established, but for my notebook to first see the router/repeater, I had to go several meters down the hall. Then it was stable until the next time I went outside and had to reconnect.

          • STL

            The router’s sole purpose is to connect the notebook with the Quest 3. That was the WiFi 6 as well as the WiFi 6E setup. No other traffic. And it is completely separated from my other routers with internet traffic. While I do value all these theoretical considerations, I value working solutions even more. I would really like to see one player using VD with WiFi 6 only and an RTX 4090 and modded Skyrim successfully connected to a Quest 3.

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            TL;DR: you already picked the (currently) best solution by using the still free 6GHz band added in Wi-Fi 6E, as the problem isn't traffic on one particular network/router, but everything using the same frequency band/channels, causing latency through data packages having to be resend after collisions.

            You already chose the most practical/working solution to reduce latency: use a less crowded frequency, 6GHz only available on Wi-Fi 6E and later. The problem isn't your traffic on your particular network, the problem is everything using the same band, for example 5GHz, which is divided into smaller 20-160MHz channels. As this is a shared band, the router doesn't get exclusive use and basically sends out a data package on a random channel/sub-band, hoping that nobody else is currently using it.

            If something else does, this causes a collision that is detected, and the router sends the same package again on a different, randomly picked channel. This unfortunately means that with more devices using the same band with a limited number of channels, the chance of collisions significantly increases. And having to resend a package multiple times due to collisions means extra latency. So anybody in your vicinity using the 5GHz band will impact your Wi-Fi performance/latency, even if they are not on your network. And whether someone can run modded Skyrim send wirelessly from an RTX 4090 to a Quest 3 really depends on the circumstances. @andrewjakobs:disqus wrote several times that he has no issues streaming to his Pico 4 over Wi-Fi 5, with much better results than on the proprietary HTC Vive Pro wireless adapter using 60GHz WiGig.

            This environmentally dependent latency is kind of a Wi-Fi design flaw/compromise. There are more complex approaches like CDMA that spread packages over the whole band instead of fixed sub-bands/channels, letting everybody talk over each other, but can reconstruct the signal from added redundancies etc. So the protocol handles collisions without having to resend packages over and over again, and you get a mostly guaranteed run time/latency. This comes at a performance cost, and Wi-Fi instead prioritizes speed over latency, which collisions potentially adding latency.

            I of course don't know if this is what caused problems for you on Wi-Fi 6, but the added latency is a typical problem caused by lots of collisions. Newer Wi-Fi protocol versions try to somewhat mitigate this, but your basic options are moving to the woods or using the still mostly 6GHz band only supported by routers from 2022 and later. I also don't know what the rumored Valve Steam Link hardware dongle for improved PCVR streaming will be, but one option is using the 6GHz band and possibly a proprietary protocol that spreads data packages similar to CDMA to guarantee low latency by avoiding package resends in case of collisions.

          • STL

            Well, since I want this clarified for once and all, I will bring my setup “to the woods” (I have cottage in the woods), as you say, and check with my Wifi 6 router there. This might become an interesting insight! I shall report back, once I’m done.

          • Christian Schildwaechter
    • Christian Schildwaechter

      I already commented on the WiFi below. According to Upload's estimate from their AVP review, the horizontal FoV is slightly smaller than on Quest 3, while the vertical FoV is 25%+ smaller. Virtual Desktop has not been ported to visionOS, but the open source ALVR doing the same with less comfort features is available as a free download on the App Store, and what everybody has been using for Steam/OpenVR PCVR streaming with AVP.

      PCVR Streaming is basically watching an interactive 360° movie, an application not requiring a lot of power because most of the work is done by very efficient hardware decoders for h.264/h.265, and one user reported a 4h VRChat session on AVP streamed from a PC. As the AVP battery pack has a USB-C port that allows charging it while using the HMD, you can hot-plug power banks, switching to a new one whenever the current one has run empty for practically endless battery life, at the cost of having to carry two batteries and charging another one in the background.

  • XRC

    The biggest news here is not the AVP being able to use the Sony controllers, but PSVR2 owners finally being able to purchase replacement controllers!