One of the coolest features of Apple Vision Pro is the ability to stream your Mac’s display directly into View. It’s called Virtual Display, and it’s a stunning feature with crystal-clear 4K images for all your Mac apps. Your keyboard and mouse or trackpad will continue to work seamlessly.
There’s just one problem. And I mean that literally.
Currently, Apple Vision Pro only supports one Mac desktop. But a new third-party app changes that. It’s aptly called Splitscreen. Based on my hands-on time with Splitscreen, I think it’s one of the best Vision Pro apps to date, despite some quirks.
The Splitscreen app is available from the Vision Pro App Store and comes with a free trial for a limited time. However, if you want to use it regularly, it will cost you $20. You’ll also need to download the applet that appears in your menu bar to your Mac.
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It’s very easy to get started. Simply launch the Splitscreen app on your Vision Pro and you’ll be prompted to click the Vision Pro option in the drop-down menu below the Splitscreen icon on your Mac. Boom, you now have one of your two desktops.
The other desktop is from Apple’s own Virtual Display option, which you then activate via Control Center. The initial split-screen window you see with all your open Mac apps turns into a clean desktop where you can drag other apps in and easily multitask.
I was able to move the Pixelmator Pro photo editing app to the Vision Pro’s second Mac display without any problems. I had no problems moving between the two desktops. However, I found the cursor movement to be slower on the Splitscreen virtual display than on Apple’s virtual display.
The Splitscreen Vision Pro app has a fairly smooth 60Hz refresh rate, but its resolution is limited to 1920 x 1080, compared to the 4K of Apple’s own virtual display. Despite this, text looked pretty crisp in Chrome when I was browsing the web or Slack. In fact, I liked having Slack on the left side of my main display so I wasn’t too distracted by messages I was receiving.
Splitscreen’s developers say they are working on adding more supported resolutions and that version 1.2 of the app will allow you to further adjust video quality settings. But overall, I think the Vision Pro is a very valuable tool for anyone looking to get the most productivity out of Apple’s spatial computing headset.
