The Monitor Is a Compromise
Think about how you use your computer right now. You have a screen — maybe two if you're lucky — bolted to a desk or balanced on a lap. You're staring at a flat rectangle of light, and all of your work happens inside that rectangle.
That's been the deal for forty years. More pixels, thinner bezels, better colors — but always a rectangle. Always a fixed amount of screen real estate. Always a physical object taking up physical space.
Spatial computing breaks that contract entirely.
With Apple Vision Pro and the emerging generation of mixed-reality headsets, your screens aren't objects anymore. They're ideas. You can have one window or twenty. You can make them the size of a wall or tuck them into the corner of your vision. You can work in a coffee shop with the screen real estate of a three-monitor setup — and nobody next to you sees a thing.
For most apps, this is a nice-to-have. For remote desktop, it's a paradigm shift.
Why Remote Desktop Gets Better in Space
Remote desktop has always been constrained by the client device's screen. You're accessing a powerful Mac or PC, but you're viewing it through whatever display you happen to be holding — a 13-inch laptop, a 10-inch iPad, a 6-inch phone. You're looking at your desktop through a keyhole.
Spatial computing removes the keyhole.
Imagine connecting to your Mac and placing the desktop in front of you as a 60-inch virtual display. Then opening a second virtual monitor to the left for reference material. Then a third above for Slack. All floating at comfortable viewing distances, all running from your Mac at home, all rendered at the resolution your eyes can actually perceive.
This isn't science fiction. macOS already supports Virtual Display on Vision Pro — you can extend your Mac's display into visionOS as an additional monitor. Apps like Immersed have demonstrated multi-screen virtual workspaces for remote workers. The pieces are here.
What's missing is a remote desktop experience that was designed for this, not bolted on.
The Current Landscape
Today, if you want to use your remote computer in spatial computing, your options are limited:
- macOS Virtual Display — Apple's built-in feature. Works well, but only when your Mac is on the same network. It's a local solution, not a remote one.
- Immersed — Pioneered VR workspaces, recently acquired by Meta. Focused on virtual monitors for local machines, with some remote capability.
- Traditional remote desktop apps — Most haven't updated for visionOS at all. The few that run do so as flat iPad apps in a compatibility window. No spatial awareness, no hand tracking, no multi-window support.
The gap is clear: nobody has built a remote desktop app that treats spatial computing as a first-class platform rather than an afterthought.
Why Native SwiftUI Apps Have the Advantage
Here's where architecture decisions made years ago start paying unexpected dividends.
visionOS is built on SwiftUI. Not "supports" SwiftUI — it's built on it. The window management, the gesture system, the spatial layout engine, the eye-tracking interaction model — all of it is SwiftUI-native. Apps written in SwiftUI can adopt visionOS features naturally. Apps written in other frameworks have to fight the platform.
Remio is 100% SwiftUI on Apple platforms.
That wasn't a decision made with Vision Pro in mind — when we started building, Vision Pro was still a rumor. We chose SwiftUI because it was the right tool for building a native iOS and macOS app. But the consequence is significant: porting Remio to visionOS is a natural extension of our existing codebase, not a rewrite.
Our streaming pipeline uses Metal for hardware-accelerated video decoding. Metal works on visionOS. Our input handling is built on Apple's gesture recognizer system. That system extends to hand tracking on Vision Pro. Our UI components use SwiftUI's layout engine. That engine already understands spatial windows and volumes.
"We didn't plan for spatial computing. But by building native, we accidentally built a foundation that's ready for it."
Compare this to Electron-based remote desktop apps. To ship on visionOS, they'd need to either run as a flat compatibility window (losing everything that makes spatial computing special) or rebuild their entire rendering pipeline for a platform that doesn't have a web browser engine. The native path is the only path that leads somewhere interesting.
What Spatial Remote Desktop Could Look Like
We're not shipping a visionOS app today. But here's the experience we're thinking about:
- Floating desktop windows — Place your remote Mac's display anywhere in your physical space. Resize it by grabbing the edges with your hands.
- Multi-monitor in thin air — Your Mac has one monitor, but in spatial computing you could split it into multiple virtual displays, or create additional workspace windows.
- Gesture-based interaction — Pinch to click. Swipe to scroll. Use natural hand movements instead of a mouse or trackpad.
- Context-aware placement — Working at a desk? Your remote desktop appears at desk height. On a couch? It floats at a comfortable angle. The environment adapts.
- Privacy by design — Nobody can see your screens. No shoulder-surfing. Work with sensitive data in public without the privacy screen.
The hardest part isn't the rendering — it's making the interaction feel natural. A remote desktop that requires you to think about latency isn't a remote desktop worth using in spatial computing. The hand-tracking-to-cursor pipeline needs to feel as immediate as touching glass.
Remio's Path Forward
We're not going to rush a visionOS app to market. The installed base is still small, and the interaction patterns for spatial computing are still evolving. Apple ships meaningful visionOS updates every year, and the developer tooling gets substantially better with each release.
What we are doing is building with visionOS compatibility in mind. Every architectural decision we make for iOS and macOS is evaluated against the question: will this work in a spatial context? Our SwiftUI views, our Metal rendering pipeline, our gesture handling — all of it is being built in a way that ports cleanly.
When the time is right — when the hardware reaches a tipping point and the interaction patterns stabilize — Remio will be ready. Not as a flat app running in compatibility mode, but as a spatial-native experience that uses the full power of visionOS.
The monitor was always a compromise. We're building for what comes after.