Can Gaming Save the Apple Vision Pro?

Apple Vision Pro is not a virtual reality headset. Not officially, anyway—instead, Apple uses the term “spatial computing” to describe the device's core function. While it's capable of placing users in fully immersive virtual spaces, it focuses more on the pass-through experience, where external cameras let users see the world around them. Most notably, many of its apps and features are tailored to entertainment and productivity purposes rather than prioritizing the VR gaming market as the likes of Meta's Quest 3 or Sony's dedicated PlayStation VR 2 do. But maybe that's where it's been going wrong all along.

While gaming does have a presence on Apple Vision Pro, the headset's use of eye- and hand-tracking for users to interact with the current visionOS means many games on the platform emphasize the mixed and augmented reality approaches of the hardware instead. There are plenty of cozy puzzlers or board game re-creations, where players can use their own hands to manipulate digital objects that appear to float in their living rooms, but fewer that warrant placing them in all-encompassing digital environments.

That could be about to change though, as a recent patent suggests Vision Pro may be about to get the one thing holding back some of VR gaming's biggest hits from coming to Apple's mixed-use headset—dedicated controllers. Alongside rumors of considerable updates coming to visionOS, per Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, a lot could be about to change for Apple's mixed-use headset.

The patent, published February 2025, is for “handheld input devices.” While it isn't expressly, overtly connected to the Apple Vision Pro, the summary describes it as potentially controlling “an electronic device such as a head-mounted device,” which “may have a display configured to display virtual content that is overlaid onto real-world content.” That sure sounds like what the Apple Vision Pro does. (Apple declined to comment for this article.)

Of course, it's important to note that the unearthed patent may come to nothing at all—tech companies routinely patent ideas that never reach consumers. Using a controller with the AVP is also technically already possible—you can pair a conventional gaming controller to Apple Vision Pro using Bluetooth, for games where a regular joypad will suffice. There are even dedicated third-party VR controllers for AVP such as the Surreal Touch, which has its own pairing app, and ALVR which allows other controllers, even the motion-sensitive Nintendo Switch Joy-Cons, to be used with Apple's headset.

The catch is that these are all primarily ways to allow SteamVR games (or any title built around Valve's OpenVR) to be played through Apple Vision Pro. That means that on top of the $3,500 AVP headset, users have to have a powerful gaming PC to run games in the first place, and a fast enough local network to stream them to the headset—ALVR suggests no other network activity and that the streaming computer be physically connected to the router by ethernet cable. It's a hack—a workaround—and far from the elegant, integrated solution for controlling Vision-native games that Apple might want.

Which brings us back to the mysterious patent. The document also describes a lanyard that can be tracked by external cameras, and shows a few possible uses for the technology, including being held vertically, somewhat like the grip-type controllers found on other headset platforms. Crucially though, the patent doesn't appear to show any buttons, triggers, or thumbsticks on the handheld input device.