When the Apple Vision Pro was introduced, Apple's first VR headset promised a whole new world of spatial computing, with no controllers required and adjustable immersion.

However, it failed to promise access to the best VR games. The presentation video ignored VR games, showing a PS5 DualSense controller connected via Bluetooth playing NBA 2K on Apple Arcade.

Thankfully, Apple did not abandon VR gaming with its first headset. In fact, Vision Pro has just achieved a major milestone in making VR games playable on the visionOS platform: as TechCrunch reported, game engine Unity, a platform for developing VR games and experiences, has announced that it has opened up PolySpatial, its platform for visionOS and Apple Vision Pro.

Unity has long been a popular VR engine, but PolySpatial appears to be a new tool specifically for development on the Apple Vision Pro. A beta version of PolySpatial was released to developers today, so expect to have plenty of VR games to choose from when the Vision Pro starts shipping in early 2024.

For those who don't know, Unity is a popular game engine that actually started out as a macOS X game engine. However, since its debut, it has expanded to many platforms and found a foothold in mobile and VR game development.

One of my favorites on our best VR games list, Superhot VR, runs on Unity along with a number of other VR games.

Because Apple Vision Pro focuses on mixed reality, it uses a combination of VR immersion, full-color pass-through, and augmented reality overlays to constantly blend the real and virtual worlds, from recreating the world around you to completely out of it to providing an experience that allows you to do just about anything.

Therefore, there are two types of apps that can be created for the headset: immersive and windowed, both of which can be developed using Unity's PolySpatial.

For immersive apps, Unity states that there are several options. Developers can port an existing virtual reality game (e.g., Superhot) or they can "replace the player's surroundings with their own environment to create a new fully immersive experience."

This approach would create a game similar to current VR games, but with significantly improved graphics. The big question that will remain at that point is whether PolySpatial will be able to fully port the game and replace the controls with hand tracking and gesture recognition, or will players still need to connect their VR controller to the Apple Vision Pro This is the question. I hope it is the former, as a controller-free experience is key to setting the Vision Pro apart from the competition.

The next option is to use a full-color pass-through of mixed reality to create games and experiences that merge digital content with the real world.

We've already seen what this looks like, as it's one of the features Meta is touting as a reason to get the Meta Quest 3 headset: a sizzle reel from the Quest 3 announcement shows VR gamers playing a game called Demeo on an actual table. You can see them playing.

Finally, developers can create games and experiences that "run multiple immersive applications side-by-side in a pass-through while in Shared Space."

and you can see it in action in the photo above.

And then there is the Window app, which is very similar to the NBA 2K experience Apple showed off in the Vision Pro announcement trailer. This option is used to bring mobile and desktop games and applications into visionOS, allowing the window to resize, move, and appear to exist in three dimensions within the user's field of view. However, the window essentially operates as a 2D space, much like looking at a TV screen to play a game on the Xbox Series X or PS5.

Unity's PolySpatial tool could play a big role in helping Vision Pro keep up with Quest 3 and PSVR 2 in terms of VR games. If porting existing games is easy, numerous developers will be able to get their best VR games onto Apple headsets by the time they are ready for launch.

Hopefully that will be the case. If not, Apple's VR headset will clearly have more firepower than any other product on the market, but we may end up getting another headset to enjoy the games, and there will certainly be a lack of vision by Apple.