An Investigation of the Apple Vision Pro for Out-of-Core Ray-Guided Volume Rendering with BorgVR
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Date
2025
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Publisher
The Eurographics Association
Abstract
We present an in-depth investigation of the Apple Vision Pro as a platform for large-scale volume visualization, focusing on both its technical capabilities and practical limitations in immersive rendering scenarios. Our study centers on BorgVR, a custom-built volume rendering system that implements a bricked, ray-guided, and out-of-core rendering pipeline tailored to the unique characteristics of the Vision Pro and the visionOS graphics stack. BorgVR is designed to overcome memory and performance bottlenecks associated with rendering structured grids that exceed device-local memory. Through dynamic data streaming, hierarchical bricking, GPU-accelerated early ray termination and empty-space skipping, the system achieves interactive frame rates for gigabyte-scale datasets, even under the constraints of mobile spatial computing. We analyze how well the Apple Vision Pro supports such workloads across its distinct rendering modes. Beyond demonstrating system performance, we evaluate the Vision Pro's suitability for scientific visualization-highlighting its strengths in display fidelity and sensor integration, while also documenting friction points such as GPU architecture constraints, memory management, and platform-specific development hurdles. The open-source release of BorgVR provides a reusable foundation for the community, facilitating future research and application development in immersive volume visualization.
Description
@inproceedings{10.2312:vmv.20251236,
booktitle = {Vision, Modeling, and Visualization},
editor = {Egger, Bernhard and Günther, Tobias},
title = {{An Investigation of the Apple Vision Pro for Out-of-Core Ray-Guided Volume Rendering with BorgVR}},
author = {Hrycak, Camilla and Krüger, Jens},
year = {2025},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association},
ISBN = {978-3-03868-294-3},
DOI = {10.2312/vmv.20251236}
}