mitch030504--Wiicompiled_VR_Frame/OPENXR.md

Experimental OpenXR VR

WiiCompiled has an opt-in OpenXR rendering path. The first functional backend is Windows D3D12. It asks the OpenXR runtime for the required GPU before Aurora creates Dawn, then copies each eye on that same D3D12 device and queue into the acquired OpenXR swapchain images. Eye submission stays on the GPU; there is no CPU texture readback and no second graphics device. Windows Vulkan is an opt-in second binding built on the same design: the OpenXR runtime creates Dawn's Vulkan instance and device (XR_KHR_vulkan_enable2) and eyes are copied on that same queue. It needs a custom Dawn build; see Windows Vulkan.

This is an experimental renderer, not yet a release-ready VR mode.

Requirements

• A Windows OpenXR runtime selected as the system's active runtime.
• A connected headset supported by that runtime.
• A D3D12-capable GPU and driver accepted by both OpenXR and Dawn, or for the opt-in Vulkan binding a Vulkan 1.1+ driver plus the custom Dawn described under Windows Vulkan.
• A build made with MKW_ENABLE_OPENXR=ON, which defaults on for Windows and off elsewhere while the Vulkan bridge remains capability-gated.

For managed installation, use WheelWizard VR and enable Settings → Other → WiiCompiled (beta) → Enable WiiCompiled OpenXR VR (beta). The launcher sets vr.enabled=true and vr.required=false before each VR launch, preserving other preferences. Its Graphics API row picks the binding, DirectX 12 or Vulkan, and keeps that choice; any other value is repaired to d3d12 at launch, because OpenXR refuses the rest. Its portable configuration lives at RecompVR/UserData/Config.toml beneath WheelWizard's data folder. Normal graphics settings remain in Recomp/UserData/Config.toml. Both backends use the normal installation's effective NAND.

Standalone launches start in VR too: this is the VR build, and required = false makes a failed headset startup fall back to the desktop renderer rather than stop the game. Config.toml is created with the following defaults, and a configuration that never mentions enabled reads the same way:

[vr]
enabled = true
required = false
mirror_view = "normal"
controller_mode = "wii_remote"
frame_interpolation_fps = 0
refresh_rate = 0
render_scale = 1.0
world_units_per_meter = 500.0
hud_distance_meters = 2.0
hud_width_meters = 2.4
hud_virtual_screen = true
flat_screen = false
immersive_window = false
first_person = false
first_person_toggle_click = true
first_person_seat = "cockpit"
cockpit_units_per_meter = 100.0
first_person_units_per_meter = 50.0
first_person_head_up_meters = 1.5
first_person_head_forward_meters = 0.0
first_person_head_right_meters = 0.0
first_person_hide_driver = true
first_person_hidden_model = 0
first_person_rotation = "yaw_pitch"
steering_wheel = true
native_steering_wheel = true
placeholder_steering_wheel = false
object_culling = false
hand_steering = true
cockpit_item_hand = "left"
cockpit_item_throw = true
performance_level = "boost"

The seven wheel_* hand-steering tuning keys are described in Steering wheel and hand steering.

To play this installation on the desktop instead, set enabled = false, close the game completely, and start it again. These settings are read only at launch. The in-game F10 settings bar also exposes the enable switch, but a restart is still required.

required = false is the safe default: an absent runtime, disconnected headset, unsupported GPU, or graphics-binding failure is logged and the game continues in ordinary desktop mode. A temporary notification explains the failure; the message remains available under F10 → VR. Set it to true only when a failed VR startup should stop the game with an error.

mirror_view chooses what the desktop window shows while the headset is running: "normal" keeps the ordinary desktop view, "both", "left" and "right" mirror the headset's eyes, and "none" blacks the window out. It is live and can be changed from the F10 settings bar, where it sits directly under the enable switch as Desktop view. Menus reach the headset as a virtual screen carrying the desktop image itself, so there is no separate eye view to mirror there and the three eye choices show that same image; only "none" differs. The F10 bar is drawn over whichever image is chosen, so the setting can always be changed back. Eye mirror modes retain the last eye image when a desktop frame has no new XR packet, so they do not alternate with the normal camera. "none" also stays black between XR packets.

Local multiplayer

During 2-, 3-, and 4-player races, the headset replays Player 1's world in immersive stereo with head tracking. Keep F10 > VR > Desktop view set to Normal (mirror_view = "normal") for the original desktop split-screen layout. No extra multiplayer switch is required. Menus continue to use the virtual screen.

Only headset replay filters the other players' viewports and expands Player 1 to each eye. The desktop split-screen partition (the game's partition_line layout, one-pixel textured picture panes on the split boundaries) and full masks of the other panes are omitted from the eyes; the desktop image keeps them. Player-local HUD viewports follow Player 1; shared orthographic overlays keep their full-screen layout on the virtual screen. Framebuffer effects that sample the desktop split-screen image are omitted from multiplayer eyes, since those textures contain the other cameras too. The local-screen count is sealed with each frame, including retained VR interpolation frames, and a layout change invalidates older XR packets.

Multiplayer uses Player 1's game camera. The optional first-person relocation and model hiding remain single-player-only: guest model visibility changes would also affect the desktop players.

The opt-in stereo_multiplayer_smoke D3D12 test reads back both eye images and the desktop EFB for 1/2/3/4/1-screen transitions with VR interpolation on and off. Actual headset racing still needs visual validation for course effects, HUD layout, pause/resume, and scene transitions.

F10 > VR > VR frame interpolation (experimental) offers Off, Auto, 72, 90, 120 and applies immediately. frame_interpolation_fps stores 0 for Off (the default), 1 for Auto, or the selected rate. The earlier frame_interpolation = true checkbox migrates to Auto. Auto renders at the headset's display deadlines; the numbered choices cap the rate of new stereo frames. They do not change the headset's physical refresh setting. For VDXR with Virtual Desktop set to 90 Hz, select Auto or 90. The menu shows both the detected headset rate and the rate of newly rendered VR frames, excluding repeated images. Menus and other virtual-screen scenes continue at the game's rate; assess interpolation during an immersive race.

VR interpolation is independent of Graphics > Race frame interpolation. The simulation, physics, audio and VI remain at 60 Hz. Scene motion is delayed by one game frame (about 16.7 ms) to interpolate between known transforms. A monotonic scene playback clock is anchored when continuous history starts and follows the VI cadence without following per-frame seal jitter. Each rendered eye pair still uses a fresh predicted head pose. In particular, a runtime predicting head poses 40-60 ms ahead must not advance scene playback beyond its known endpoints. This needs enough GPU headroom to render both eyes at the target rate, and carries the desktop interpolator's experimental artifacts, especially for unmatched or changing geometry.

Refresh detection uses XR_FB_display_refresh_rate when available and the OpenXR predicted display period otherwise. Interpolation requires XR_KHR_win32_convert_performance_counter_time for the packet's display-time metadata; the menu reports if it is unavailable. The old Eager Frame Heartbeat option has been removed and existing eager_frame_heartbeat settings are ignored. Completed rendering wakes the XR thread immediately. A 50 ms keep-alive still protects pauses and window dragging without eager repeats during rendering.

render_scale scales the per-eye size recommended by the OpenXR runtime (0.25 to 2, never above the runtime's maximum). It defaults to 1.0 on PC and 0.8 on the Quest, whose mobile GPU needs the headroom. It is live: F10 → VR → Render resolution (also on the headset panel's VR tab) sets it in percent, applies it when the slider is let go, and saves it. Below the slider, Each eye gives the left eye's size now and, while they differ, the size the slider's value gives.

A new scale never interrupts the picture. Each backend keeps two swapchain pairs, one on display and one Aurora writes next, and rebuilds only the second, at the start of the frame that writes it; the other follows a frame later, once it is the one written. The new swapchains are created before the old ones go, and a replaced pair is not destroyed at once: the compositor may still be consuming the layer that last showed it (the spec lets a runtime use the images after xrDestroySwapchain, and destroying a pair straight after its last frame lost the Vulkan device on a PC runtime), so it lives on for kOpenXRRetiredSwapchainCycles (8) more pacing cycles, each of which ends another compositor frame, and goes with the session if it is still waiting then. Before a pair is destroyed Aurora forgets its images: the D3D12 bridge waits for any copy still writing them, and the Windows Vulkan bridge drains Dawn's queue and drops its wraps of the old VkImages (the runtime may hand the same handles to the new swapchains); on the Quest the backend's own copy device is idled. The Windows Vulkan binding also takes Dawn's device guard around xrCreateSwapchain and xrDestroySwapchain, since mid-session Dawn's worker is submitting on the shared queue. The Quest also replaces its shared eye buffers, whose Dawn imports are released (aurora_vulkan_forget_stereo_buffers). Those buffers are kept as large as both pairs, growing with the first pair rebuilt larger and shrinking once the second has followed it down, and each copy moves only what fits the image it writes. If the runtime cannot allocate a size, the log says so, the eyes keep the size they had (a pair already rebuilt goes back to it), and that size is not tried again until the scale changes; the saved value is still what the next launch asks for. mkw_openxr_replay_tests and mkw_openxr_vulkan_replay_tests cover the rebuild, the display pair left alone, the replaced pairs outliving their last frame by exactly that many cycles and going with the session otherwise, the images forgotten before their swapchains are destroyed, and both kinds of refusal. world_units_per_meter controls the scale of headset translation in the game world. hud_distance_meters and hud_width_meters place and size the virtual screen. They are read at launch and govern both the menu screen and the in-race 2D screen, so 2D content keeps its place across the transition. hud_virtual_screen decides whether the race's 2D layer uses that screen; it is live and can be flipped from the F10 settings bar. flat_screen (default off) keeps races on that same flat screen, as the menus are, instead of immersive stereo: the whole race, 3D world and HUD alike, is the game's own picture on the quad, as in DolphinXR's Flat Screen mode. The first-person camera, hand steering, the lean-back angle, VR frame interpolation and hud_virtual_screen shape only the immersive race view, so none of them apply while it is on; the right-thumbstick first-person toggle is ignored rather than changing the saved setting. It is live, as F10 → VR → Race view → Flat screen (the headset panel's VR tab) and the Quest launcher's Settings page, and turning it on or off mid-race switches on the next frame through the presentation policy's safety generation. immersive_window (default off) is the third race view, between the two: the race keeps its immersive stereo view, head tracking and all, but is seen only through a window, with the room around it on the Quest; see The immersive window. flat_screen wins when both are set. The settings present the three as one choice, Race view: Immersive, Immersive window or Flat screen. passthrough (Quest only, default on) shows the room through the headset's cameras around the menu screen and every other virtual screen, instead of black: an XR_FB_passthrough reconstruction layer submitted under the screen's quad, as PPSSPP VR does, with the blend mode left OPAQUE. A fully immersive race never shows it, and the cameras are paused for the race; a race in flat_screen is a virtual screen like the menus, so the room shows around it too, and so it does around the immersive window. It is live, from the headset panel's VR tab or the launcher's Settings page. The app declares com.oculus.feature.PASSTHROUGH, without which Horizon OS composites nothing for that layer. So that the room frames the picture rather than black bands, the Quest's menu quad shows only the part of its eye-sized image Aurora draws into (the desktop snapshot, and the in-eye settings panel's rectangle), at the same size per pixel, so nothing moves. hand_tracking (Quest only, default off) makes the first-person cockpit's hands follow the headset's hand tracking; see "Tracked hands" under Steering wheel and hand steering. How each eye is replayed is fixed; the former stop_at_display_copy, skip_copy_clears and single_pass_eyes settings are ignored. An eye ends at the frame's final GXCopyDisp, so it holds the frame shown on the desktop. It keeps the EFB reset that follows a display copy: Aurora marks only a display copy's reset, the final one lies past the replay's end, and an earlier one erases exactly what the final copy did not show. And it is drawn in one render pass. The desktop image ends a render pass at every GX copy, because the copy reads what was drawn before it; an eye samples the copies the desktop image made and never performs them, so it keeps drawing in the pass it has open, and it leaves out whatever a later clear of the whole color and depth erases. The picture is the same with less GPU memory traffic, which a tiled mobile GPU pays for at every split (the "Eye replay plan" log line reports each new pass structure). first_person and the first_person_* values are the first-person camera described below. All four are live and are also exposed in the F10 settings bar. performance_level is the level asked of the runtime through XR_EXT_performance_settings for its CPU and GPU domains: boost, sustained_high, sustained_low, power_savings, or default to leave the runtime's own choice. Standalone headsets clock their cores by this request (see docs/quest-port.md); desktop runtimes rarely offer the extension, and the setting then does nothing. It is read at launch, and the session log records whether the runtime accepted it and any later performance notification (a thermal or rendering warning). foveation (Quest and Steam Frame only, default medium) shades the edges of the immersive race view more coarsely: off, low, medium or high, see Foveated rendering. A session launched with it off runs without fragment density maps, so going from off to a level takes a restart; between levels, and back to off, it is live from the headset panel's VR tab. The launcher's Settings page has it too. eye_tracked_foveation (default on for the Steam Frame, off elsewhere) centres it on the player's gaze where the runtime offers XR_EXT_eye_gaze_interaction with an eye tracker; see Eye-tracked foveation. refresh_rate is the display rate in Hz asked of the runtime through XR_FB_display_refresh_rate each time the session starts and whenever it changes, or 0 (the default, 120 on the Steam Frame) to leave the headset's own. The game renders 60 frames a second, so 120 Hz shows each frame for exactly two refreshes. A rate the runtime does not list, or declines, is logged and leaves its own; setting 0 again restores the rate the session started at. It is live from F10 / the headset panel (Headset refresh rate) and the Quest launcher; runtimes without the extension ignore it.

Controllers

The headset's tracked controllers reach the game through an OpenXR action set synced on the pacing thread (runtime/src/vr/openxr_input.cpp), which feeds a virtual SDL gamepad that Aurora assigns to a port like any other. controller_mode decides what the game finds on that port, and is live from F10 > Controller settings > VR controllers; the game sees a change as a controller reconnection.

The pacing thread only publishes that gamepad; the game thread writes it to SDL where it already polls controllers (OpenXRApplyControllerState, called from PAD__Read_HLE and the overlay's per-frame work). SDL holds its joystick lock for the length of a device enumeration, and the Bluetooth Wii Remote rescan (F10 > Controller settings > Keep scanning, wii_continuous_scan, off by default) makes SDL close and reopen every HID device twice per scan. Measured at 15 ms on a plain desk and over 200 ms with a Lighthouse setup's dongles on the bus, which is why the pacing thread must not wait on it: a frame it holds open that long costs the compositor every display slot that passes, and [xr-diag] reports it as a stalled, late frame with skipped display slots. That rescan still pauses the game thread for as long, so leave it off unless a real Wii Remote is in use.

"wii_remote", the default, presents them as a Wii Remote with a Nunchuk, the way DolphinXR's OpenXR Wii Remote does, with buttons adapted from its default OpenXR Wii Remote profile for the Touch controllers. The port is served through KPAD like a Bluetooth remote (wii_remote_input.cpp), so WPADProbe reports a Nunchuk and the game runs its own Wii Remote + Nunchuk control scheme:

Controller	Wii
Right A	A
Right trigger	B
Right B	C (look behind)
Right stick up / down	1 / 2
Left X or left menu	+
Left stick	Nunchuk stick
Left trigger	Z
Left Y	Settings panel (not a Wii button)
Either grip	Takes hold of the wheel (not a Wii button)
Right stick click	First-person camera on / off (not a Wii button)
Right controller motion and aim	Wii Remote accelerometer and pointer
Left controller motion	Nunchuk accelerometer

Analog inputs count as pressed past half travel. The grips, right stick left / right and the left stick click press no Wii button, and nothing presses − or HOME: Mario Kart Wii never reads −. Left X presses + as well as the left menu because the PlayStation VR2's controllers give no usable left menu, so pause would otherwise be out of reach there. C sits on right B rather than a grip because hand steering holds a grip down for a whole corner, and C is the game's look-behind. The game's Wii Remote rumble vibrates both controllers, subject to the ordinary controller-vibration switch.

The Steam Frame's controllers get their own profile where the runtime offers it (XR_VALVE_frame_controller_interaction, /interaction_profiles/valve/frame_controller_valve): right A, B, trigger and stick as above, left View as the left menu (+), the left shoulder as left Y (the settings panel), and the left D-pad as the Wii Remote's D-pad (the gamepad's D-pad in "gamepad" mode). The table is in docs/steam-frame.md.

Motion. Each XR frame the aim and grip poses are located at the measured current time (XR_KHR_win32_convert_performance_counter_time, XR_KHR_convert_timespec_time on Android), not the predicted display time, whose extrapolation sprays fast wrist motion. The grip's linear velocity, averaged with one derived from its position, is differentiated over XrTime into acceleration; gravity is added and the result is expressed in the aim pose's frame. KPAD's accelerometer axes are the aim pose's (x, -y, z) in g: a level controller reads (0, -1, 0), pointing at the floor (0, 0, 1). Readings saturate at ±3.6 g like the remote's sensor, and a controller that loses tracking repeats its last reading. The game's own motion detection (tricks, wheelies) then works on these readings as it would on a remote's.

Pointer. The pointer is absolute, as in DolphinXR: the right controller's aim ray is intersected with the screen the renderer is showing, and the point it meets is where the cursor goes, so there is nothing to recenter. On the menu screen that is the quad layer, hud_width_meters across with the eye texture's aspect, and the pointer spans the game picture inside it (Aurora letterboxes the desktop image into the quad and the picture into the desktop image, so a 4:3 picture keeps its pillarboxes; the Quest crops the quad to the desktop image without changing where it is). During a race it is the 2D layer's screen, hud_distance_meters ahead of the latched race origin and turned by the lean-back angle, with the picture's aspect. With hud_virtual_screen = false the race's 2D layer has no fixed place and the pointer is off. The game's own pointer switch (KPADEnableDpd / KPADDisableDpd) is honoured as well.

The hit becomes KPAD's pos (−1..1 across the picture, +y down), horizon (the controller's roll on the screen) and dist (perpendicular distance in metres, so rotating the controller does not change it). Like a real remote's camera, the pointer keeps tracking up to 1.9 half-widths and 1.5 half-heights past the picture's centre; a lost hit or an excursion beyond that holds or pins the cursor for 100 ms before it disappears, so tracking spikes during fast motion do not drop it. Raw IR camera dots in KPADGetUnifiedWpadStatus stay invalid; the game reads the pointer from KPADStatus.

Settings in the headset. Left Y opens the settings panel described below; while it is open the controllers operate the panel and the game sees them idle.

Hand steering. With hand_steering on, in the first-person cockpit, a grip squeezed near the steering wheel takes hold of it, and while held the wheel steers through the Nunchuk stick's X axis; see Steering wheel and hand steering. Turning the wheel moves the controllers, and the game's own motion detection still reads them, so a sharp enough turn can read as a shake.

Held item. cockpit_item_hand accepts "left" (default), "right", or "off" and is also available in F10 > VR. In cockpit view, the selected tracked hand holds one item model from the game's Race/Common.szs after the roulette settles. The item stands upright just above the palm with its front toward the player. It turns only with the hand's heading, so rolling or tilting the hand never tips it over. Triple items show their remaining inventory count beside the model, facing the player. The display follows player 1's inventory: using, losing, or deploying the item removes it from the hand even if a deployed object remains near the kart. Stick steering and the existing item buttons still work. The imported models use their static bind pose; item effects and animations are not reproduced in the hand. Each material is drawn from its own data: texture layers with their wrap modes, SRT and environment mapping, vertex colours, culling, blending and up to four TEV stages. Only the lighting is approximated, by a fixed cockpit light in place of the course's light set.

Throwing the held item. With cockpit_item_throw on (the default; F10 > VR and the Quest launcher), a quick swing of the item hand forward throws the item ahead of the kart, and a swing back throws it behind. The swing plays what the game reads for an aimed throw: the stick pushed fully forward or back, the item button (the left trigger: Z, or the GameCube's L) pressed and released while it stays pushed, then the stick handed back. Items used on the press and items thrown on the release (a trailed shell or banana) both see the aim. Swinging while holding the item button throws the trailed item, and that held button is then ignored until it is let go, so it does not use the next item of a triple. Only the stick's Y axis moves, so a held wheel keeps steering. A swing counts when the hand covers enough ground along the seat's forward axis within a short window, mostly along that axis, and is still moving that way: with a controller 18 cm forward or 15 cm back within 0.12 s. A bare hand gets an easier profile, 15 cm forward or 13 cm back within 0.15 s. The headset's cameras lag and smooth a bare hand, and often lose it for a few frames in the middle of a fast swing. A loss of up to 0.2 s (0.1 s for a controller) is bridged by the positions either side of it. The window counts only tracked time, and across a gap the swing must still average 70 % of the window's speed, so a slow drift the cameras briefly lost never throws. Reaching for the wheel, bringing a hand back to rest, a sideways sweep and the upward flick of a trick never throw either. The hand must not be holding the wheel and must have been free for a quarter of a second, and after a throw the next one waits 0.6 s. It works with controllers and tracked hands, in both controller modes, and a short pulse confirms it. Each throw's line in the run log gives what the swing measured (for example Held item thrown forward (bare hand, 21 cm in 150 ms, across a tracking gap)). Mario Kart Wii reads tricks and wheelies from the Wii Remote's accelerometer only (MotionController::UpdateForNunchuck never reads the Nunchuk's), so a swing of the left hand cannot trick. With the item in the right hand, a hard swing can also read as a shake of the remote.

Bare hands. On the Quest, with hand_tracking on and the controllers put down, the hands drive khr/simple_controller: a right pinch is A with the pointer on the hand's aim ray, the left palm-up pinch is + (pause), and in the cockpit, while a hand holds the wheel, that hand holds A and a free hand's pinch is Z; see "Tracked hands" under Steering wheel and hand steering. A bare hand feeds no motion; flicking the hands up plays one shake instead. With hand_tracking off a bare hand presses nothing but +.

"gamepad" keeps the controllers one ordinary gamepad read through PAD as a GameCube controller: A/B → South/East, X/Y → West/North, index triggers → trigger axes, grips → shoulders, thumbsticks → sticks (clicks → stick buttons), left menu → Start. Every binding in the F10 controller menu applies. Left Y is GameCube Y here, so clicking both thumbsticks together opens the settings panel instead. The right thumbstick click on its own still toggles the first-person camera.

"none" makes the controllers nothing to the game, for playing with another controller (a desktop gamepad, a USB wheel or a Bluetooth Wii Remote). The virtual gamepad is unplugged, so it takes no port and the other controllers keep theirs; the game sees a switch to or from "none" as that controller disconnecting or connecting. The plugging follows the mode on the game thread, where the gamepad is already written, so the pacing thread never waits on SDL's joystick lock for it. The controllers still open the settings panel with left Y, point at it and toggle the first-person camera with a right thumbstick click; they press no game button, drive no Wii Remote, cannot take hold of the cockpit's wheel, and the game's rumble does not reach them.

Bindings are suggested for oculus/touch_controller (Quest 2, 3 and Pro) and khr/simple_controller. mkw_vr_wii_remote_tests checks the accelerometer frame, the pointer raycast and debounce, the picture placement and the button profile without a headset.

Settings in the headset

The F10 settings bar is only visible on the desktop window, so the same settings are also offered on a panel inside the headset, in menus and during an immersive race alike, including on the Quest. Press left Y to open it, and again to close it (with controller_mode = "gamepad", click both thumbsticks together instead); the left controller's menu button and the panel's Close button also close it. It can be opened from the desktop as well, with F10 → VR → Show these settings in the headset.

The panel has the F10 bar's menus as tabs (VR, Camera, Graphics, Controllers, Audio, Diagnostics) and a Recenter view button. Aim a controller at it: the cursor goes where you aim, a trigger (or A / X) selects and drags sliders, and a thumbstick scrolls. Whichever hand last pulled its trigger does the pointing. Changes apply exactly as they do from the F10 bar, and the two stay in step.

While the panel is open, and until every button has been released after it closes, the game sees the VR controllers idle: no buttons, no pointer and a remote at rest. Nothing reaches the game from the panel button, the trigger that clicked Close, or the menu press that closed the panel. The game is not paused, so a race carries on while you change settings. Other controllers (keyboard, desktop gamepads, Bluetooth remotes) are not affected.

The panel sits centred on the virtual screen, three quarters of its width across (1.8 m with the default hud_width_meters). On a menu that is the anchored menu quad; in a race it is the 2D layer's screen, hud_distance_meters ahead of the latched race origin and turned by the lean-back angle, whether or not hud_virtual_screen places the HUD there. Recenter view brings both back in front of you.

How it is drawn: settings_overlay.cpp builds the panel with a second Dear ImGui context of its own, a 1440 × 1080 canvas at twice the desktop menu's scale with its own font atlas, fed by the pointer that openxr_input.cpp publishes through vr/openxr_settings_panel.h. That context shares the desktop context's renderer backend data: ImGui's current context is one process-wide pointer, and Aurora's frame worker renders draw data while the game thread may have switched to the panel context, so the WebGPU backend has to find its device objects through either (without this, a worker render during the switch crashed on a null backend, seen while dragging the panel's sliders). Aurora renders that draw data into a panel texture once per sealed frame (aurora-main/lib/stereo_overlay.cpp). The ImGui backend keeps a single projection uniform, so the panel's pass is submitted on its own command buffer before the desktop's ImGui pass of the same frame is recorded.

The panel is shown as a compositor quad layer of its own, submitted over the scene's projection or menu quad layer. The compositor samples the 1440 × 1080 canvas directly, so its text stays sharp whatever render_scale gives the eyes. Every backend (D3D12, Windows Vulkan, Quest) makes the panel's swapchain pair the first time the panel opens (two 1440 × 1080 swapchains, plus two shared buffers on the Quest) and keeps it for the session. Until then nothing is allocated, and while the panel is closed nothing is copied or submitted. While it is open, each frame hands Aurora one more target after the eyes: the stereo bridge copies the panel texture into it with the eyes (or a transparent image on a frame where the panel is not drawn). The layer follows the eyes' swapchain pairing: the image a frame wrote is shown only once that frame is submitted, so a cancelled frame never shows an unwritten panel. The quad hangs exactly where the pointer's hits are tested (SettingsPanelScreen in openxr_integration.cpp). ImGui's premultiplied output is blended with XR_COMPOSITION_LAYER_BLEND_TEXTURE_SOURCE_ALPHA_BIT, and Aurora leaves the panel out of the eyes (aurora_set_stereo_panel_layer).

If a backend cannot make the panel's swapchains, it logs that once and the panel is drawn into the eye images instead: through the eye's frustum and viewFromCenter onto the screen rectangle for an immersive eye (including headset-rate interpolated eyes, which reuse the texture), and as a centred rectangle on a virtual-screen eye image.

Measured on a Quest 3 (base game, a Grand Prix start with the player idle, render_scale = 0.8, 60 FPS, eight interleaved rounds per state), the layer costs nothing while the panel is closed. While it is open, the app's GPU time is 10.5 ms per frame with the layer, against 9.7 ms drawn into the eyes (9.4 ms closed). GPU load is 74% against 67%, and the compositor's time 1.05 ms against 0.75 ms. Game and headset frame rates did not change. The compositor redraws the layer at display rate, so the panel stays steady even when the game drops frames.

mkw_vr_settings_panel_tests covers the panel button in both controller modes, the release latch, selection, scrolling and the canvas mapping; gx_fifo_tests covers where the panel lands in each eye on the fallback path. mkw_openxr_replay_tests and mkw_openxr_vulkan_replay_tests cover the layer: nothing made before the panel opens, the panel image of a cancelled frame never shown, no layer while the panel is closed or has no place yet, and render-first pacing.

The first-person camera

By default the headset sits where Mario Kart's own chase camera sits, and world_units_per_meter of 500 presents the race as a small diorama on a table. Turning on first_person moves the camera to the local driver's head instead, at one of two seats:

• first_person_seat = "cockpit", the default, sits you at the driver's own eyes, behind the steering wheel, at a life-size scale, so the wheel or handlebar is within reach of your hands. The eye is measured once per race from the character's head bone, while the kart drives straight, undamaged and at normal size, and then frozen. Custom models without a separate eye mesh use the animated head with a small upward/forward offset; until calibration completes the bind pose, or the vehicle's authored seat height, stands in. Rejected measurements never alter that fallback. Eight consecutive samples must stay within two units of the first sample, so a slowly moving starting animation cannot qualify just by moving little each frame. The eye is kept at least 0.45 m behind the wheel and at most 0.40 m above the neutral hand targets, so long faces and necks do not leave the controls below comfortable reach. The world scale is cockpit_units_per_meter (default 100) multiplied by the character's eye height over 100 units, so tall characters sit at a comparable height, and by the player's current size, so a lightning strike or a mega mushroom resizes the view, the wheel and the grab reach together. The seat follows the simulation's position and driving direction, never the animated chassis, so damage spins and tricks do not throw it around. Recenter view (including its key binding) and headset reference-space recentering request a fresh cockpit calibration as well as resetting the headset position. The previous seat stays in place until a new stable, neutral measurement is ready; then height and wheel clearance are recalculated together. Recenter while driving straight at normal size to replace a bad initial seat.
• first_person_seat = "custom" places the head at first_person_head_up_meters and its two companions in the kart's own frame, at first_person_units_per_meter.

Both are a matter of taste rather than properties of the game, so the F10 bar exposes them.

Toggling it from a controller. Clicking the right thumbstick turns first person on or off exactly as the F10 checkbox does, and the choice is saved the same way. It works on the VR controllers in either presentation (the right controller gives a short tick), and on any other gamepad while VR is running. A click counts on release, and only if the left thumbstick stayed up and the settings panel stayed closed throughout, so clicking both thumbsticks to open the panel in gamepad mode never toggles the camera. A gamepad whose right thumbstick click is bound to a GameCube control on its port, as a button or in an input expression, keeps it for the game instead. Toggled in a menu, the change applies from the next race. first_person_toggle_click = false, or the F10 checkbox under the camera toggle, turns the click off. mkw_vr_camera_toggle_tests covers the click rule.

The kart is selected through the game's local-screen-to-racer mapping, including online races where your racer is not slot zero. First person requires a locally controlled racer; spectating another racer keeps the game's own camera.

The game's own transforms are never modified. Each guest frame the runtime reads the race camera's view matrix and the player kart's physics pose and derives one affine transform from the recorded view space into the space to render from. That transform is published with the sealed frame, and the renderer composes it onto every perspective draw's model-view matrix, alongside the headset's own per-eye delta. The kart's physics pose is used deliberately, not the animated model: an animated frame would bob and lurch the camera.

first_person_rotation decides where the view's orientation comes from, mirroring DolphinXR's camera-anchor modes. "yaw" keeps the horizon level through a chase-camera tilt or a banked corner. "yaw_pitch", the default, adds the kart's climb, so a slope or a wheelie tips the view while a banked corner still never rolls it: sitting in the cockpit, the vehicle's own climb reads as the ground rising rather than as the view tipping. "full" takes the kart's whole orientation, banking included. All three are the same construction from a forward and an up axis, differing only in which pair they take: pairing a forward with world up is what removes roll. The headset always adds free look on top of whichever is chosen, and only the translation onto the head is common to all three.

In the cockpit, "yaw" takes the kart's own driving direction rather than the chase camera's lagging heading, from the level seat frame, which also damps a damage spin. "yaw_pitch", the default, and "full" take the kart's live orientation about that same seat, keeping only its stabilised position, so a wheelie, a slope or a spin moves the view with the vehicle. With the custom seat, the head's place in the kart is first_person_head_up_meters and its two companions, measured in the kart's own frame; the F10 sliders exist because the comfortable value is a matter of taste and is best judged from inside the headset.

The mode engages only in a single-screen race, the same content that already qualifies for immersive stereo. Menus, split-screen, flat_screen, and the virtual-screen fallback are unaffected, and so is the desktop mirror, which keeps showing the game's ordinary third-person view. If the kart or camera cannot be read the camera stays where the game put it rather than guessing.

Your own driver sits exactly where your eyes are, so their head would fill the view. first_person_hide_driver removes it. The game applies one draw byte across every model of a kart and to its body, so clearing it outright takes the vehicle along with the driver; first_person_hidden_model names a single model to hide instead. On PAL RMCP01 a kart carries two models and index 0 is the driver, which is the default: the character goes and the vehicle stays. -1 restores the blunt behaviour and hides everything. An index the kart does not have hides nothing, and the log reports how many it has when the mode engages. The F10 bar presents this as two toggles, "Hide driver" and "Hide driver and kart", alongside a button that restores every first-person default. Both settings touch your own kart only, so the other racers are untouched, and the original values are restored when first person stops or the race ends. This is the one place the first-person camera modifies the game rather than only reading it.

In cockpit view, your Bullet Bill keeps its animated arms but hides the body, eyes and rear exhaust cone, which otherwise fills the view from inside. The runtime resolves the local racer's Killer model and registers its rigid body position arrays with the renderer for that frame. Only draws at that Bullet Bill's own model-view transform are skipped; opponents sharing the model, arm joints, and the separate ground shadow remain visible. The requests are cleared after the frame and when cockpit view stops. This changes rendering only, without modifying game assets or the item's behaviour. mkw_vr_bullet_bill_tests and Aurora's HiddenModelTest cover body/arm selection, malformed models, instance matching, and both FIFO and raw draw paths.

As with the rest of the race instrumentation, the object offsets this reads are specific to the project's supported PAL RMCP01 translation.

Object culling

Mario Kart hides what its own chase camera cannot see, and that camera does not know where the headset is looking. Turn your head far enough in an immersive race, or look over your shoulder in first person, and karts, characters and course objects are simply missing until the game camera catches up; the race intro's pan shows it too, since the other racers are culled from the intro camera's narrow view. object_culling = false (F10 > Camera > Object culling, also on the headset settings panel's Camera tab) draws them anyway, and takes effect immediately. That is the PC's default. The Quest defaults to true, the game's own culling, because every model drawn costs its GPU twice, once per eye.

Measured on a Quest 3 (base game, the first Grand Prix race at Luigi Circuit after the intro, player idle, first-person cockpit, render_scale = 0.8, foveation medium, six interleaved rounds per state, GPU clock fixed at 492 MHz), turning culling off kept 60 FPS in the game and the headset:

Culling	Draw calls a frame	Both eyes	App GPU per frame	GPU load	CPU load
On	352	7.4 ms	9.7 ms	67%	54%
Off	482	8.9 ms	11.0 ms	74%	64%

A track that already keeps the Quest's GPU near its limit, such as Retro Rewind's SNES Ghost Valley 2, would lose headset frames to the extra eye time, hence the Quest default.

The game culls in two places, and the switch covers both. NW4R's scene gather tests each model's bounding box against the camera frustum (nw4r::math::FRUSTUM::IntersectAABB_Ex); with culling off that test reports every box as partially inside. Mario Kart's own ClipInfoMgr then tests each kart, item and object against per-screen side planes derived from the camera (ClipInfoMgr::UpdateScreenInfo); with culling off those planes carry zero normals, which no model can be beyond. Both functions are replaced by faithful native reimplementations in runtime/src/vr/mkw_vr_culling.cpp, so with culling on they compute exactly what the translated originals did. mkw_vr_culling_tests covers the frustum test. What stays as the game decides it: the draw distance, the course's area-based clipping groups, and every gameplay rule, since none of this changes physics or object updates.

The setting only takes effect while VR is enabled (a session that fell back to the desktop for want of a headset included), and not in the Flat screen race view, which shows the game camera's own view. It costs GPU time: every model the camera would have dropped is drawn for both eyes. On the Quest, where the eye passes are geometry-bound, leave it on unless the missing racers bother you more than the frame time.

Steering wheel and hand steering

Ported from heurazy's mario-kart-wii-VR-port (GPL-3.0-or-later). It applies to the cockpit seat.

The wheel turns. With steering_wheel = true (the default) the kart's steering wheel or the bike's handlebar turns with your steering: the left stick's deflection at the full-lock angle (wheel_kart_degrees 90, wheel_bike_degrees 45), eased so a flicked stick does not snap it round, or the hands' own angle while they hold it. native_steering_wheel = true turns the vehicle's own model. Karts bake the wheel into the body, so at the race draw boundary the runtime decodes the body's MDL0 position arrays and shape connectivity. Hand grips locate the wheel, but its complete rim determines the rotation centre, radius and tilt: grip height/spacing varies by character. Whole rim and spoke components turn together on a copy; a column or chassis component crossing the selection stays intact. The authored transform of the bone that draws the body's node 0 is included when locating and turning the wheel (the Baby Booster authors its body with rotated axes). That bone is found by its node id, not its place in the bone dictionary: the Flame Flyer and Cheep Charger list an nw4r_root bone first, and taking that one left both on the separate VR wheel. The copy goes to the GX thread; Aurora substitutes it into draws that bind that array with the player's model-view matrix including that bone's transform (aurora_set_native_wheel_vertices), checking each changed vertex's matrix slot, so an opponent sharing the asset and other joints of the same draw are untouched. The guest's own vertices are never written, and the copies are dropped after the frame's draws. Bikes turn their handle part in the game already; its copy is only re-seated on the cockpit frame so the bars stay with your hands while the bike banks. The wheel rides in the same frame as the view: the level seat for "yaw", the kart's own orientation for "yaw_pitch" and "full". While no draw takes the copy (for 30 frames running; the race's opening pan does this) the vehicle's own is drawn as the game poses it. The copy keeps being published, so the vehicle's own wheel turns again as soon as draws take it again, and the log notes both switches.

The placeholder wheel. placeholder_steering_wheel = true (off by default; F10 and the Quest launcher's Settings > VR) draws a separate VR wheel for karts, or handlebar for bikes, whenever the vehicle's own is not the one turning: with native_steering_wheel = false, and during the stretches above where no draw takes the copy. Off, only the vehicle's own is seen, and the hands reach for it wherever its geometry is known, turning or not; where it is not (a kart whose grips were not found), they reach for where the placeholder would stand, in front of the seat.

Validated on the extracted PAL disc's 216 single-player kart/character and Mii combinations (all 18 kart types): each resolves its node-0 bone as the runtime does and selects the complete 21-position rim and 15-position spoke assembly, with the remaining positions unchanged and connected-piece distances preserved. Regression tests also cover raised/narrow grips, domed hubs, rotated roots, a node-0 bone listed behind another, child joints, chassis triangles crossing the wheel volume, degenerate strip connectors and malformed MDL0 data. This asset check does not by itself verify every combination's live draw matching or modded vehicle models.

The substitution is decided per draw, and a draw that folds into a neighbour renders through that neighbour's array binding, so only draws that reached the same decision may merge. Deciding this per array instead, and so refusing to merge every primitive that binds the vehicle's array, cost 6 ms of GPU time a frame on a Quest 3 (a race frame has 228 such primitives, recorded once and replayed in the mono pass and both eyes) and took a 56 FPS race down to 42. debug.wiicompiled.fpslog 1 reports the draw calls a frame and the primitives merged away, which is where that shows up first.

The copy is matched against the race camera's view (RaceCamera::GetViewMtx with no dolly offset), because the scene camera is only set once the draws run. The log reports, once a second, how far that view is from the scene camera at the seal ([mkw-vr] cockpit: race camera view vs scene view) and how many draws took the copy; the F10 bar shows the same under the steering-wheel settings. Aurora adds a line after about half a second, five seconds and a minute of copies (Native steering wheel: N sets; draws binding a replaced array ...) counting the draws that bound a copied array, those that bound one outside the window it was set for, the matches, and how far the closest position matrix was from the expected one; the first such line with a bound draw also prints both matrices.

Hand steering. hand_steering (on by default, and in WheelWizard's OpenXR VR settings and the Quest launcher's Settings > VR, beside the seat) lets you take hold of the wheel or handlebar with the tracked controllers. It costs nothing until a grip actually takes hold: until then the stick steers as it always has. Squeeze a grip near it: past 55 % squeeze, within wheel_grab_distance metres of its plane (default 0.35) and near the rim, or near a bar end, scaled by wheel_grab_assist. Once taken, only letting go of the grip releases it. One hand steers by its angle around the hub; two hands steer by the line between them, so leaning or moving both arms together does not steer, and a hand joining, leaving or crossing the hub keeps the steering where it was. Turning past full lock is kept, so retracing the gesture returns to the same centre, while the game's steering saturates at full lock. wheel_response scales how quickly the wheel follows, wheel_tracking_grace (seconds) how long a hand that loses tracking keeps hold, and wheel_haptics gives a short pulse on grab and release.

While the wheel is held it replaces the left stick's X axis, in both the Wii Remote and the gamepad presentation, and the game keeps its own steering curve. The stick's Y axis still aims items, and a holding grip no longer reaches the game (a shoulder on the gamepad; the Wii Remote presentation leaves the grips unbound for this reason); the triggers, A and the right stick are unchanged. Releasing both grips gives steering back to the stick. The settings panel withholds the wheel like any other input.

A USB wheel. With a USB wheel and pedals set up (see the README), the wheel drives the race as player 1's GameCube controller. The cockpit's wheel follows its calibrated steering, at the same full-lock angle as the stick (wheel_kart_degrees, wheel_bike_degrees), and hand steering steps aside while it drives.

Tracked hands. hand_tracking (Quest only for now, default off; the Quest launcher's Settings > VR and the headset panel's Camera tab, under hand steering, which it needs) poses the cockpit hands from the headset's hand tracking instead of curling them with the grip. Two hand trackers (XR_EXT_hand_tracking) are located every XR frame at the display time. While the controllers are held the Quest builds the joints from their touch sensors (XR_EXT_hand_tracking_data_source's controller source: the trigger finger, the thumb on its rest or a button, the grip); once they are put down, from its cameras. The runtime's hand mesh is then skinned with the joints themselves, each joint's tracked pose times its inverse bind pose (the bind poses are in the mesh's space, as xrLocateHandJointsEXT reports poses), with no curl and no grip; a runtime with joints but no mesh (SteamVR, Virtual Desktop) gets a skeleton along the joints. A hand whose joints are not located, or not finite, falls back to the curl at its grip. The trackers exist only while the option and hand steering are both on, and serve the mesh too; the extensions (with XR_FB_hand_tracking_aim) are asked for when either is on at launch, otherwise turning the option on applies after a restart. The log says OpenXR tracked hands ready (controller-driven hands: yes|no) and, at each change, OpenXR tracked hands: left camera, right controller; the headset panel shows each hand's source under the checkbox.

The Quest app declares horizonos.permission.HAND_TRACKING (and the older com.oculus.permission.HAND_TRACKING), normal permissions granted at install with no prompt, and oculus.software.handtracking as optional: without that flag Horizon OS keeps the app controllers-only. With it, putting the controllers down drives khr/simple_controller from the hands (an index pinch is select, the left palm-up pinch the menu), and every change of interaction profile is logged (OpenXR interaction profiles: left ..., right ...). A hand driving that profile instead of the Touch one (its squeeze action inactive, its select active) is a bare hand; with tracked hands off it presses nothing but the menu gesture, which pauses, is not drawn, and feeds no Wii Remote motion, so the permission changes nothing for players who leave the option off. On PC none of this applies: a PC runtime can drive real controllers through khr/simple_controller and synthesize joints for them, so a hand-edited hand_tracking = true only changes the drawing.

Left to itself, Horizon OS switches all input between the controllers and the hands, and it switches back to the controllers as soon as one lying on a table moves, so a race started with the controllers connected tended to stay on them (a Quest 3 log went controllers, hands, controllers within seconds). An app cannot disconnect them. Instead, with tracked hands on, the input resumes simultaneous hands and controllers (XR_META_simultaneous_hands_and_controllers, Meta's "multimodal"), which overrides that switching: a controller that is not in a hand no longer owns it, so the cameras track that hand at once, while a held controller keeps working (its fingers from its touch sensors). The log says OpenXR simultaneous hands and controllers on (and off when the option goes off). Meta documents that it cannot run together with passthrough and wide motion mode both on, and not while body tracking is; this app uses neither of the last two.

With tracked hands on, bare hands drive. A hand is bare while it has no controller in it (its squeeze action inactive) and either drives khr/simple_controller or has camera-tracked joints (a free hand under simultaneous tracking may get no profile our actions are bound in), latched through wheel_tracking_grace (Meta also drops the select action while a hand is lost) and cleared as soon as a controller's squeeze is back. Its palm joint stands in for the grip and a grasp for the squeeze: the middle, ring and little fingers' flexion, summed over each finger's three joints, read as 0 below 1.2 radians (a relaxed hand) and 1 from 3.0 (a hand closed on a rim), so the wheel's own 55 % press and 15 % release apply, and closing a hand on the rim takes hold. The grasp never reaches the game's buttons (as a squeeze it would press the gamepad's shoulders). In the cockpit, while a bare hand holds the wheel it holds the gas (A, the gamepad's South) until both hands let go, and a pinch from a free bare hand, either one, uses an item (Z, the gamepad's L) if the hand has been off the wheel for 0.15 s and is still mostly open (a grasp under 0.5), so neither opening a hand off the rim nor closing one on it fires one; holding the pinch holds the button. The left palm-up pinch pauses (a pinch made in that gesture is not an item: XR_FB_hand_tracking_aim reports the system gesture). With no bare hand on the wheel, in the cockpit or anywhere else, a right pinch is A and the pointer follows the hand's aim ray, which is what the pause menu and the results need; in a race it also gives gas without steering. A left pinch then does nothing, so the headset panel cannot be opened with bare hands (an open one takes a right pinch, and the palm-up pinch closes it). The game's own pointer switch cannot tell driving from those menus: MKW keeps it on in a race (checked on a Quest 3, 2026-09-25). Manual drift has no gesture: choose Automatic drift. The headset panel reads out each hand's source, grasp, hold and pinch under the checkbox, for tuning.

A bare hand feeds no Wii Remote motion: camera-tracked poses are too noisy to differentiate twice, and turning the wheel would trick and wheelie. Tricks come from a flick instead. Both hands on the wheel rising together (at least 1.2 m/s on average, 0.6 m/s each, within 0.6 m/s of each other) or a free bare hand rising at 1.5 m/s makes one; a turn, where one hand rises as the other drops, never does, nor does a lone hand on the wheel. A rise has to last three samples and cover 5 cm within 150 ms, a pose jumping faster than 5 m/s (tracking coming back) resets it, and flicks are 0.5 s apart. A flick plays one shake on the remote's accelerometer: 150 ms, so the guest sees it on at least three of its frames, one cycle up to +2 g and down to the -3.6 g limit, as Dolphin's emulated shake does. Only the Wii Remote presentation has it (the gamepad has no shake); debug.wiicompiled.inject <n>:flick plays the same shake with or without hands.

Hands and the separate wheel. Hands are drawn while hand steering is on: the runtime's own hand mesh where it offers one (XR_EXT_hand_tracking and XR_FB_hand_tracking_mesh, requested when hand steering or tracked hands are on at launch), otherwise procedural gloves that curl with the squeeze. A Quest 3 offers that mesh even without the app declaring hand tracking, and the log says which is drawn ([mkw-vr] cockpit hands:). Both close their fingers towards the palm: the mesh's joints point -Z towards the fingertip and +Y out of the back of the hand, so flexion is negative about the joint's own X, on both hands. They and the separate VR wheel or handlebar travel with the stereo packet in metres in the seated frame, and each eye draws them inside the scene's pass just before the first 2D-layer draw, depth-tested with the world's own depth mapping, so the kart and the track hide them. Visible cockpit samples also mark one stencil bit; virtual-screen draws test that bit for zero, so even depth-disabled HUD elements and black screen effects cannot paint over the hands. Only stereo eye targets use Depth24PlusStencil8; desktop/EFB depth stays unchanged. The mask is cleared once per eye replay and retained across its passes. This adds no draw, full-screen copy, or render pass; eye-format pipeline siblings share shader modules and are cached when recording the game frame (aurora-main/lib/gfx/cockpit.hpp). The anchor also carries the frame's exact world scale (aurora_set_stereo_scene_anchor_scaled), and Aurora rescales each eye's head translation to it, so a scale change between the XR packet and the frame cannot misplace the hands.

The guest offsets involved (driver, movement, damage, grip frames, bike handle, driver bones and their world matrices) are PAL RMCP01 constants listed with the leaf getter or constructor that proves each in runtime/src/vr/mkw_vr_first_person.cpp. mkw_steering_wheel_tests, mkw_vr_cockpit_tests and mkw_vr_hand_steering_tests cover the grab model, the seat and wheel geometry and the hand-off to the game, and mkw_vr_hand_tracking_tests the tracked hands' rules (grasp, bare latch, pinch gate, bare-hand buttons, flick and its shake); gx_fifo_tests covers the per-draw substitution and the overlay geometry, joint skinning included, and cockpit_gpu_smoke its depth test on a real GPU.

Presentation policy

The runtime deliberately fails safe instead of guessing which Mario Kart camera is active:

• Menus, loading screens, unclassified scenes, and multiplayer render on a head-locked virtual screen.
• A PAL RMCP01 race scene switches to immersive stereo only after translated-code observers confirm exactly one distinct race camera for the current GX frame.
• Leaving the race or observing zero or multiple cameras immediately returns presentation to the virtual screen. Session/runtime loss safely tears down XR and continues on the desktop mirror.
• flat_screen clears the policy's immersive_races, so a race stays on the virtual screen however complete the observations are. Changing it advances the safety generation like any other change of presentation, and the pacing thread still treats that race as a race: pipeline caches are not stored mid-race on the virtual screen either.
• immersive_window is not a policy state: the race is ImmersiveRace either way, and only the packet and the layer that shows it carry the window.

Aurora records the original GX frame once and replays it for both OpenXR eyes. Perspective GX draws receive asymmetric headset projections, while the game's 2D layer goes on a fixed virtual screen (see below). Menus and unsafe whole scenes use the virtual-screen path. Head pose is sampled by the OpenXR pacing thread, while Aurora's frame worker consumes a short-lived immutable stereo packet. Each sealed GX frame and immersive packet carry the same policy-generation tag; a mismatch is rendered in mono and the acquired XR frame is canceled, so an asynchronous menu/race transition cannot replay race transforms over unsafe content.

With interpolation off, PC (D3D12 and Windows Vulkan) and standalone (Android Vulkan) pace render-first: the pacing thread locates views for an estimated display time (two periods past the last prediction), hands Aurora a packet without leaving a compositor frame open, and waits for rendering. A 50 ms stall repeats the retained layer; cancellation also advances a keep-alive cycle to refresh timing. Once rendering is submitted, the thread calls xrWaitFrame and xrBeginFrame, completes backend-specific copy/release work, and ends the frame using the packet's original render poses with the current compositor display time.

Android Vulkan renders into shared buffers and copies them into newly acquired XR images afterward. Both PC bindings acquire images from their non-retained swapchain pair before rendering; Aurora queues the copy on the session's queue before reporting completion. PC therefore needs no additional copy in the short compositor cycle. Pending images remain acquired and separate from the retained pair until completion or confirmed cancellation before encoding. GPU failure still requires the existing queue-drain teardown. Rendered poses keep the session/reference-space serials recorded when the packet was prepared, so changes during rendering invalidate them.

VR interpolation keeps the frame-first order on both backends because it renders for the frame's own predicted display time. The log announces OpenXR D3D12 pacing: render-first (or OpenXR Vulkan pacing: … on the Vulkan binding) or frame-first (VR interpolation) on each transition. For PC testing, disable VR frame interpolation for a race capture; changing desktop interpolation alone does not select this path. Menus use render-first even when VR interpolation is configured for races. Compare the new diagnostic open, end-gap, late, and stage timings against a frame-first capture on the same course and settings. Shorter open alone does not prove fewer black frames: rendering and xrWaitFrame still take time outside that interval. Hardware testing is needed to measure latency, runtime throttling and visible blackouts.

With VR interpolation enabled, Aurora retains each sealed race's command stream and matched previous/current transform uniforms. New OpenXR packets wake the frame worker between game frames. It interpolates at the local scene playback time, then applies that packet's predicted head pose and the scene anchor to both eyes. Native offscreen effects and the 2D HUD retain their game-frame updates. A mid-frame EFB readback invalidates retained GPU data; a policy-tag mismatch rejects the replay. Missing matches use current transforms, and stalls clamp at the last known pose instead of extrapolating. The ordinary desktop interpolation settings remain independent.

Matched rigid draws retain transform history through rotations over 90 degrees per game frame (such as spinning kart tires); large spins use spherical interpolation to preserve angular speed and wheel shape. A one-matrix draw is split into a rotation and an upper-triangular stretch (scale and shear), so a sheared matrix interpolates too. Lakitu sways by tilting his whole body's Y axis (Lakitu::Movement::UpdateScale): his goggles and eyes ride his face bone as one-matrix draws, and his head is skinned to that same bone. When the shear was rejected, the goggles stayed on the game frame while the head moved on, and sank into it. Camera/seat anchors keep their conservative cut and rigidity guards, and draw translation, matrix validity and indexed-palette topology checks still apply. Exact mesh/pipeline identity can also retain motion across texture-pattern swaps, as used by the Waluigi Stadium crowd. The crowd's image animation itself still updates at the game's cadence; its transform can move at the headset rate without snapping whenever the image changes.

For single-player races the guest thread also publishes the recorded scene camera with the frame. VR matching and previous transform endpoints are expressed in the current camera's coordinates, while replay samples the world-space camera/seat pose separately. Camera turns therefore do not trip the 1500-unit object-motion guard on distant scenery. Held particles, new objects and rejected billboard animations also follow that sampled camera instead of mixing a current-frame view with an interpolated seat. Direct vertices already in view space with an identity position matrix retain that matrix, avoiding a second camera transform. Particle simulation and texture/vertex animation still run at the game rate. Actual teleports, camera cuts and malformed view matrices retain their guards. Multi-camera frames and hosts that do not publish a view keep the existing interpolation path.

CPU-built particle quads are paired one quad at a time, and only where the pairing is unambiguous. An emitter draws many look-alike quads: a boost speed line (rk_koukasen) is two crossed 12 × 300 quads, two new lines start on the same ring every frame, and each moves further per frame than the gap to its neighbours. Pairing nearest centres swapped about half of them and swept every new line in from one that had just died. Each quad therefore also records its two edges. A pair must change shape by less than 30%, each side must prefer the other, and its cost (squared centre distance plus squared edge change) must beat the runner-up among other particles by 1.5×. The two quads of one cross share a centre and do not count as rivals. A particle already tracked must land within a quarter of its last step of its predicted position. A particle without a path is read two ways, fixed in the world or carried with the camera, and the group follows the reading that fits its tracked particles: carried ones step less in camera space. A first step is drawn moving only when both readings choose it; otherwise it just seeds the path. An unpaired quad is held where the game drew it: in camera space when its group follows the camera (speed lines, kart sparks), in the world otherwise (smoke left behind). Groups with more than 4096 candidate pairs are held without matching.

The D3D12 pacing thread retains the last completed projection or virtual-screen layer and resubmits it during stalls, including while moving the desktop window, pausing, or minimizing. The scene freezes until rendering resumes; the compositor can still reproject the retained image for head movement. Repeated layers keep their original render poses and field of view, paired with the new compositor display time. Two pairs of eye swapchains keep the retained image separate from pending or canceled rendering (at the cost of additional GPU memory). Unencoded packets can be withdrawn after 50 ms; encoded work retains its images while the pacing thread continues submitting the last completed layer. A stall alone no longer requests desktop fallback after 250 ms.

Before the first valid image, when OpenXR requests no rendering, or after a session/reference-space change invalidates the retained content, frames can still have no layers (on the Quest outside a race, only the passthrough layer while passthrough is on, so a recenter does not flash black). Actual runtime or GPU submission failures retain the safe teardown path. This does not detect black images rendered by the game itself, and cannot keep submitting if the entire process or XR runtime is suspended. All OpenXR session and swapchain calls remain on their owning thread.

The race's 2D layer

The minimap, race position, item roulette, lap times and the rest of the game's orthographic layer would otherwise be stretched across each eye's entire field of view. With hud_virtual_screen on they are instead placed on a rectangle fixed in the recorded camera's own frame, hud_distance_meters ahead of it and hud_width_meters across, its height following the aspect ratio the game is presenting at. The screen stays where the camera puts it, so looking around moves the view across it rather than dragging it along.

An orthographic GX projection is affine, so the draw's clip position is already its position on the flat frame. Replay folds three further steps into that same projection matrix, one per eye: the draw viewport into full-frame coordinates, the frame position onto the screen rectangle, and the screen through that eye's view and OpenXR frustum. The draw's own position matrices are left alone.

Depth uses the equivalent of DolphinXR's Exact Screen Depth path. A replay-only shader variant carries the draw's original GX depth through a flat-interpolated value and explicitly writes it at the fragment, including the draw's recorded viewport depth range. The reprojected geometry itself is parked at mid-depth for clipping. This avoids the view-dependent perspective-divide rounding that otherwise breaks equal-depth LEQUAL ordering and causes overlapping menu/HUD elements to z-fight.

Two classes of draw are deliberately left on their recorded transforms: native framebuffer effects, which belong to the rendered image rather than to the game's 2D layer, and any draw whose matrix is not actually affine. A native framebuffer effect is recognised three ways: it samples a freshly produced EFB copy that is reduced or blended back (bloom and the rest of the post-processing chain); it samples a fresh copy inside a viewport that does not cover the frame (an offscreen bake such as the 440x440 corner in which Mario Kart Wii builds its object shadow map, copying each stage back out); or it samples no texture and blends with destination alpha. The last is how Mario Kart Wii draws its dynamic shadows: the shadow volumes are perspective draws that count their coverage into the EFB's alpha plane, and one full-screen orthographic quad then darkens the image by destination alpha. The eyes replay the volumes, so that alpha exists in each eye, and the quad has to cover the whole eye: on the virtual screen it shaded only the screen's rectangle, cutting every shadow off at its edge. Retained one-shot EFB bakes such as Mario Kart Wii's minimap are treated as game art and remain eligible for the screen.

One native effect is replayed differently: a composite that samples a freshly produced, frame-sized depth copy. Mario Kart Wii draws a ghost kart by rendering it alone into the cleared EFB, copying the frame's colour and depth out, drawing the race, and blending the copies back with one orthographic quad whose depth comes from the depth copy. Left on its recorded transforms, that quad stamps the desktop's flat image of the ghost over each eye, following the head and cut off by the eye's own ground. An eye therefore skips the perspective draws of the pass that produced the depth copy where they were recorded and re-issues them in the composite's place, with this eye's transforms, a constant-alpha blend (kCompositeSourceAlpha, about the strength of the game's own composite) and a depth test against the world the eye has drawn by then: the ghost in stereo, translucent, where the game put it. The desktop image is unchanged. The link is made as the composite is recorded, so frames without a composite do no work for it, and a draw only costs one comparison. The constant-alpha pipeline variants exist only for pipelines seen among a composite's source draws: such a pipeline gets them from its next draw, and until then the eye leaves that draw out, so a ghost first drawn in a session is missing from the eyes for that one frame. The link is logged once (Immersive replay: pass N ... is re-issued by each eye).

A reprojected 2D draw uses the full eye viewport and scissor because its recorded rectangle no longer describes where it ended up; its original viewport is folded into the projection instead.

The immersive window

immersive_window shows the immersive race through a window rather than all around you. The window is the race's 2D-layer screen: hud_width_meters across and hud_distance_meters ahead of the race origin latched at the race start, turned by the lean-back angle, its height following the picture's aspect. That is where the HUD, the Wii Remote pointer and the settings panel already sit in an immersive race, so the HUD lies on the window's plane and the pointer aims at it. The window always carries the 2D layer, whatever hud_virtual_screen says: stretched across the eye, the HUD would be cut by the window's edges. It sits straight ahead of the race's forward direction, as the HUD does, which is the reference space's forward rather than the heading the menu screen was anchored at, so after an in-game recenter while facing sideways the two can differ.

Inside the window nothing changes: the eyes are the immersive race's, with their per-eye frusta, head tracking, first person, hand steering and VR frame interpolation. Moving your head therefore shifts the view through the window like a real window's, and geometry nearer than the window's plane is still cut by its edges, as a stereo picture's frame cuts it.

How it is drawn: the pacing thread marks the stereo packet (AuroraStereoFrame::window), and after an eye's last draw Aurora covers the eye with one full-screen triangle (aurora-main/lib/gfx/window_mask.hpp) that keeps the colour inside the window with alpha 1 and leaves transparent black outside it, with a one-pixel ramp at the edge. The triangle carries, at each corner, where that pixel's ray meets the window's plane in homogeneous window coordinates (stereo_replay::window_mask), which interpolate exactly across the image. It is drawn in the eye's own last render pass, so it adds no pass and no tile load; an eye that is still split into several render passes gives it a pass of its own, as the cockpit overlay has. On the Quest the backend submits the passthrough layer, then the projection layer with XR_COMPOSITION_LAYER_BLEND_TEXTURE_SOURCE_ALPHA_BIT (premultiplied alpha), then the settings panel. The flag travels with the packet, so the eyes Aurora masked and the layer that blends them always belong to the same frame, and switching the race view mid-race needs no safety generation: presentation stays ImmersiveRace. The PC backends keep their projection layer opaque, so the window is surrounded by black there.

Only the window is rendered on the Quest. Rather than render the whole eye and mask most of it, the pacing thread aims each eye through the window itself (AimEyesThroughWindow in openxr_integration.cpp): the eye keeps its position but looks square-on at the window's plane, through an off-axis frustum just around the window, so the image is the window. It keeps the display's pixel density (the swapchain's pixels per unit of tangent as the eye is located) at the window's size seen from the race origin, which is fixed while the window's geometry is: about 680 x 380 per eye with the default window at render_scale 0.8, against 1344 x 1408 for a whole eye. A two-pixel border around the window is left transparent by the mask. The frame's views carry that pose and field of view to the projection layer, whose imageRect is the rendered part of the swapchain image, and the compositor reprojects it like any other. Aurora copies the smaller eye into the corner of the shared buffer (vulkan_interop.cpp), and does not foveate these eyes: their field of view follows the head, which would rebuild the density map every frame, and they are small already. The PC backends copy whole eyes into the swapchain, so there the window's eyes stay full size and masked.

Measured on a Quest 3 with a Retro Rewind race paused (the same 439 draw calls every frame, render_scale 1.0, 60 FPS throughout), switching the race view from the headset panel:

Race view	GPU level and clock	App GPU per frame	Both eyes	GPU load	Compositor
Immersive window	1, 456 MHz	11.0 ms	8.4 ms	82%	1.6 ms
Immersive	3, 599 to 640 MHz	13.4 ms	10.3 ms	88%	0.7 ms

The headset raised the GPU's level for the fully immersive race and it still took longer: in clock cycles the window's frame is about 42% cheaper (5.0 against 8.6 million), which lets the Quest keep the GPU at its lowest level. The compositor's extra time is the passthrough. During a race at render_scale 0.8, switching the two with a temporary debug property, both eyes took 6.3 to 7.5 ms through the window against 9.1 to 9.5 ms whole and masked at similar draw counts (the compositor's SF field read 0.31 against 0.80), with the clock wandering between 350 and 600 MHz. The saving is smaller than the eye's pixels (about 13% of a whole eye's) would suggest because much of an eye's cost is the geometry of every draw, which each eye still processes; it grows with render_scale. Read the VrApi line's CPU4/GPU=<levels>,<clocks>MHz before comparing two timings.

gx_fifo_tests covers the window's geometry (its corners through an asymmetric eye frustum, its agreement with the HUD's placement, an eye turned away or beyond the window, a sideways step), and mkw_vr_config_tests how the two keys read as one race view.

Foveated rendering

On the Quest, foveation shades the edges of the immersive race view in 2x2, then 4x4 pixel blocks, where the headset's lenses blur the picture anyway, and gives the GPU time back for a higher render_scale or a steadier frame rate. Each eye's render pass runs under a fragment density map (VK_EXT_fragment_density_map, attached through dynamic rendering). The map is centred on that eye's forward direction, which the asymmetric frustum places off the image centre, towards the nose. Its rings are angles from that direction (aurora-main/lib/gfx/foveation.hpp):

Level	Full rate	Half (2x2)	Quarter (4x4)
low	within 30°	beyond	never
medium	within 25°	25° to 40°	beyond 40°
high	within 18°	18° to 34°	beyond 34°

The HUD is drawn in the same render pass as the world and is foveated with it. low and medium keep the default HUD screen (2.4 m wide at 2 m) at half rate or better while you look straight ahead; high coarsens its corners. Menus and every other virtual screen, the settings panel, and anything drawn outside an immersive race are never foveated.

XR_FB_foveation, the extension DolphinXR uses by default, cannot help here. The runtime's density maps only shape render passes that draw into its swapchain images, and on the Quest Dawn draws each eye on its own device and hands it to the OpenXR device, which copies it into the swapchain. So the map has to go into Dawn's own eye passes. The stock Dawn package has no such feature, so the Quest build links a Dawn built with Aurora's patches (aurora-main/patches/dawn, built by android/Build-QuestDawn.ps1, see docs/quest-port.md). The patch enables the extension only when Aurora asks for it at device creation, and every render pipeline then carries the density-map pipeline flag. That is why the launch decides.

A density map forces Adreno into binned rendering, where every extra render pass in an eye stores and reloads the whole eye. DolphinXR measured foveation as a net loss on Mario Kart Wii for exactly that reason (its bloom chain splits the frame about 20 times). An eye is therefore foveated only when it is drawn in a single render pass, as every eye is by default; an eye that a partial clear still splits is drawn at full rate. The session log reports what happened: "Fragment density maps: enabled" at startup, one "eye foveation" line per eye and level with the map's size, and the "Eye replay plan" lines. debug.wiicompiled.fdm 0 launches without density maps at all (docs/quest-port.md).

What it saves depends on how much of an eye's cost is shading pixels. The numbers below are from a Quest 3 at Luigi Circuit's Grand Prix start: GPU time of both eyes per frame, all settings interleaved within one session (docs/quest-port.md has the method).

render_scale (eye size)	One pass per recorded pass	One pass per eye	low	medium	high
0.8 (1344x1408)	5.82 ms	5.11 ms	5.09 ms	5.36 ms	5.11 ms
1.3 (2184x2288)	6.32 ms	5.81 ms	5.33 ms	5.00 ms	4.56 ms

At the Quest's default 0.8 an eye's time goes mostly to geometry and to storing its tiles at full resolution. The Wii's shading is cheap, so foveation saves nothing measurable there, although the density map verifiably applies (4x4 blocks at the view's edges on High). At higher render scales it takes 8 to 22% off the eyes, which is where it earns its keep, bought with a softer periphery. The Quest defaults to medium all the same: it costs nothing measurable at 0.8, it is already on when the render scale is raised, and a session launched with a level can change it live, where one launched with off needs a restart. The Quest's GPU applies the density per screen tile, and inside a reduced-rate tile it also samples textures one level blurrier per halving. Most surfaces hide it, but fine animated detail does not: on Retro Rewind's swamp goo the tiles show as squares where the ripples give way to a smoother look. It is no fix for a heavy track: on Retro Rewind's SNES Ghost Valley 2 at 1.0, GPU-bound at about 40 FPS, no level raised the frame rate, while merging the eye passes did (39 to 41.5 FPS).

Eye-tracked foveation

With eye_tracked_foveation, a runtime that offers XR_EXT_eye_gaze_interaction and reports an eye tracker (the Steam Frame's SteamVR) has its gaze pose located for each packet's display time and turned into tangents of each eye's view (vr/eye_gaze.h), which AuroraStereoFrame carries as gaze/gazeValid. Aurora centres the level's rings on the gaze snapped to a cell of two map texels (about 3 degrees), keeping up to 32 maps per eye, one per cell looked at, and binds a new one once its upload completes, the previous map staying bound meanwhile. Without a tracked gaze (a blink, no tracker, the setting off) the map is the forward one above, unchanged. Details and the Steam Frame checks are in docs/steam-frame.md.

Diagnostics

F10 > Diagnostics holds three bug-report aids.

OpenXR diagnostic logging is off by default. When it is off, each hook on the pacing thread is one atomic test. It applies immediately and is remembered as:

[diagnostics]
openxr_logging = false

When it is on, console.log receives lines tagged [runtime] [xr-diag] (runtime/src/vr/openxr_diagnostics.cpp). They cover both the D3D12 and the Vulkan backend.

• Session description. Written when logging starts and again for every new OpenXR session. It gives the runtime and system names and versions, vendor id, tracking support, backend, reference space, blend mode, enabled extensions, recommended and maximum eye sizes, render_scale, swapchain sizes, display period, and the VR frame interpolation setting.

• View geometry. Written on the first located views and again whenever they change by more than 0.5° or 0.5 mm. It gives per-eye FOV half-angles, the eye cant (the angle between the two eyes' forward axes: 0 for parallel displays, non-zero for canted ones such as Pimax without parallel projections), and the IPD.

• Scene motion ([vr-motion]). With VR interpolation active, Aurora logs a separate one-second summary. blended, previous, and current count samples inside the two known scene endpoints or clamped to either endpoint. discontinuous counts samples without continuous history/timing. same-time and backwards compare the sampled game-scene timeline, not head poses, pixels, or compositor submission FPS. Persistent same-time with fresh XR layers can explain smooth head tracking but juddering steering. The latest sample-boundary and weight expose exhausted scene history; display-boundary and prediction-lead describe the independent runtime head-prediction horizon. Latest draw counts distinguish identity matched from transform prepared; rejected means a paired draw failed the transform guards. Unmatched draws can also snap, and these counts do not measure GPU time. max-rejected is the highest rejection count observed during the window. scene-step gives minimum/maximum forward scene-time advancement per sample in milliseconds; steady 90 Hz scene motion should advance about 11.11 ms each time, even when every submission is fresh. Enable the same renderer log with debug.wiicompiled.fpslog=1 on Android, or AURORA_VR_MOTION_LOG=1 in the environment before launching a host that does not use OpenXR.

  camera-separated=true confirms the frame used the published scene camera and the separate camera/object interpolation path. If false during a single-player race, include that in the capture so a missing/invalid camera publication can be distinguished from object rejection. For steering judder, capture a single-player race with VR frame interpolation = Auto (the Graphics interpolation setting is separate). Keep the headset refresh, render scale, camera mode, and opponent count fixed. Compare a stationary head while alternating steering left/right with a stationary kart while turning the head. On PC, keep SSW disabled for this capture so generated compositor frames do not mask the application's scene cadence.

• A one-second summary. Timings are median/worst in milliseconds; for end-margin, worst is the minimum.

Field	Meaning
predicted-rate, cycles	Reciprocal of the runtime's predicted display period, not necessarily physical headset refresh rate; compositor cycles (xrWaitFrame/xrEndFrame pairs, repeats included).
skipped-slots	Display slots the predicted display time jumped over: the runtime throttled or dropped frames.
late	Frames whose xrEndFrame came after their predicted display time (needs XR_KHR_win32_convert_performance_counter_time or XR_KHR_convert_timespec_time).
layers new/repeat/empty	Cycles ending with a newly rendered layer, the retained layer again, or no layer at all (black).
discarded, layer-rejected	Retained layers dropped by a session or reference-space change; rendered layers not submitted (invalid pose or views, failed release).
wait-frame, open, end-call	Time blocked in xrWaitFrame, from xrBeginFrame to xrEndFrame, and inside xrEndFrame.
end-margin, end-gap	Predicted display time minus the xrEndFrame time; interval between xrEndFrame calls.
pickup, render	Stereo packet published until Aurora's frame worker takes it (without interpolation this includes waiting for the next 60 Hz game frame); taken until the pacing thread observes the submission result. These are CPU wall times for completed submissions, not GPU timestamps; canceled packets are measured separately below.
acquire, release	Swapchain image acquire+wait and release.
keepalive	Retained-layer repeats while Aurora was still encoding past the 50 ms keep-alive.
packet-unused, packet-rejected, submit-failed	Packets not picked up before cancellation; packets picked up but not encoded by the bridge before cancellation (the precise rejection cause is not known); failed stereo copies.
interp-skip	Cycles the VR interpolation rate cap chose not to render.
frames immersive/screen	Cycles per presentation mode; not-rendered counts cycles without views to render.
no-orientation, no-position	Cycles whose head orientation or position was not valid.
suppressed	Event lines dropped by the rate limit.

• Stage timings. A separate [xr-diag] stages ms line accompanies each nonempty window, independently of the event rate limit. Each field is median/worst in ms; @cycle=N,t=Ts identifies the worst call's diagnostic cycle and completion time since logging/session reset. The main summary also includes the last cycle and t. Cycle 0 is before the first wait; work between cycles belongs to the previous cycle. These are wall times, including time the OS did not schedule the thread. Nested measurements (notably sync-actions within input-sync) must not be added together.

Stage	What it isolates
poll-events, begin-call, locate-views	Event polling, the xrBeginFrame call itself, and xrLocateViews.
input-sync, sync-actions	Complete input update and its xrSyncActions call.
publish, withdraw	Packet construction/publication and withdrawal, including mutex waits.
set-targets	D3D12/Vulkan bridge target registration, including its mutex wait.
submission-wait	Actual time waiting for a render result, including timeout paths; compare against the requested 50 ms.
cancel	Bridge cancellation attempt, whether it succeeds or fails.
cancel-age	Publication to cancellation, including packets never picked up.
cancel-pickup, cancel-after-pickup	Publication to pickup and pickup to cancellation for consumed, canceled packets.

For a blackout report, enable logging before entering a race, reproduce the blackout, and export the logs immediately afterward. Include the approximate time and whether both eyes and the desktop mirror went black. Check frames immersive is nonzero for an immersive-race capture. A large stage maximum identifies where the pacing thread spent time, but cannot distinguish API blocking from OS scheduling without a system trace. No empty layers does not rule out black image contents or compositor/display problems. This instrumentation does not change frame pacing or inspect image pixels.

• Event lines. At most 8 per second; the rest are counted in suppressed. They report late frames, skipped display slots, stalls (more than 2.5 display periods, and at least 25 ms, between xrEndFrame calls), empty frames and their reason, discarded retained layers, rejected layers, withdrawn or rejected packets, failed submissions, and head-tracking loss and recovery. Reference-space change events are never rate-limited.
• Presentation changes. While logging is on, every [mkw-vr] presentation= transition is logged, not just the first 16.

First-person camera logging is off by default as well. When it is on, a race in first person writes a set of [mkw-vr] first-person and [mkw-vr] cockpit lines to console.log once per second: the anchor's head offset from the race camera, the scene's view matrix and the kart's physics pose (with the raw bits of its translation), where each candidate camera sits relative to the kart, and the cockpit's wheel placement and race-camera check. They are the first thing to read when the first-person view is misplaced. It applies immediately and is remembered as:

[diagnostics]
first_person_logging = false

Export Logs opens the system folder picker. It then creates a WiiCompiled-logs-YYYYMMDD-HHMMSS folder at the chosen location, containing:

• Logs/: every retained run folder, the current session included. The runtime prunes run folders after four days.
• Config.toml.
• export-info.txt: the export time, the exporting process id (whose run folder ends in _pid<id>), and the OpenXR state.

The current console.log is copied through a shared-read stream while it is still being written. The copy runs on SDL's dialog thread (runtime/src/log_export.cpp), and the outcome is shown under the button. mkw_openxr_diagnostics_tests and mkw_log_export_tests cover both without a headset.

Windows Vulkan

video.graphics_api = "vulkan" selects a second Windows binding, runtime/src/vr/openxr_vulkan_win32.cpp, with the same pacing thread, retained-layer protocol and policy as D3D12 (runtime/include/vr/openxr_windows.h picks the backend at startup). It is opt-in. It has raced on a headset (SteamVR/OpenXR with a PlayStation VR2): immersive projection held the headset's full 90 Hz with no skipped display slots, and a 646-second session recorded no rejected or discarded layers and no failed submissions. Other runtimes are still unexercised.

Why a custom Dawn. The pinned prebuilt Dawn DLL exposes no native Vulkan device, so aurora-main/patches/dawn adds a small versioned C ABI to the pinned Dawn source (aurora_dawn_vulkan_abi.h, AURORA_DAWN_VULKAN_ABI = 1): hooks that let the OpenXR runtime create Dawn's VkInstance, choose the physical device and create the VkDevice; wrapping of a borrowed VkImage as a Dawn texture; the release barrier back to COLOR_ATTACHMENT_OPTIMAL; a device-guard lock; and a queue drain. Launcher/Build-DawnVulkan.ps1 builds that DLL from the pinned revision on a machine with Visual Studio 2022, Python 3.12+ and CMake, and writes aurora-vulkan.json (revision, ABI, DLL hash). Launcher/Prepare-Dependencies.ps1 -DawnVulkanPackage <dir> installs it as dawn_prebuilt in a fresh dependency destination after checking that provenance; re-harvest native_prebuilt afterwards because the archives are pinned to the Dawn DLL hash. The runtime build also fetches Vulkan headers (vulkan_headers dependency).

Startup. QueryGraphicsRequirements loads xrGetVulkanGraphicsRequirements2KHR, xrCreateVulkanInstanceKHR, xrCreateVulkanDeviceKHR and xrGetVulkanGraphicsDevice2KHR, then installs the hooks in Dawn. Without the custom DLL it fails with "requires the custom Dawn library with Aurora Vulkan ABI 1" and the game continues on the desktop renderer. During aurora_initialize the runtime creates Dawn's instance (Vulkan 1.2 is requested when the loader and runtime allow it, so that timeline semaphores, which PC runtimes create on the application's device, are a core feature the device hook can enable) and device on the runtime's physical GPU. BindAurora confirms that Dawn's physical device is the one the runtime selected, creates the session on Dawn's graphics queue, picks the sRGB sibling of Aurora's UNORM colour format (with XR_SWAPCHAIN_USAGE_MUTABLE_FORMAT_BIT) so the compositor decodes the gamma-encoded bytes, and enables the bridge.

Frames. Each acquired XR image is wrapped once as a Dawn texture and reused. Aurora's frame worker records the eye copies into its own command buffer; immediately after queue.Submit, still under Aurora's submit mutex, the bridge appends the release barrier through Dawn's queue and publishes the token that the pacing thread's WaitForSubmission consumes. The runtime may use the VkQueue only inside xrBeginFrame, xrEndFrame, xrAcquireSwapchainImage and xrReleaseSwapchainImage, so OpenXRRuntime::LockGraphicsQueue holds Dawn's device guard around exactly those four calls and never across xrWaitFrame or xrWaitSwapchainImage.

Tests. mkw_openxr_vulkan_replay_tests compiles the real backend against the deterministic compositor of the D3D12 replay tests, including the queue-guard requirement on acquire and release. vulkan_native_bridge_smoke (aurora, AURORA_GPU_SMOKE_TESTS=ON, real GPU, no headset) drives the custom DLL's ABI through three borrowed-image copy/readback cycles; run it with that DLL beside it.

Backend status

Backend	Status
Windows D3D12	Implemented: same-adapter, same-device asynchronous OpenXR submission.
Windows Vulkan	Implemented, opt-in (video.graphics_api = "vulkan"): the runtime creates Dawn's Vulkan instance and device through XR_KHR_vulkan_enable2, eyes are copied on the same queue, and Dawn's device guard is held around the four queue-touching OpenXR calls. Needs the custom Dawn from Launcher/Build-DawnVulkan.ps1. Raced on SteamVR/PSVR2 at the headset's full rate; other runtimes unexercised. See Windows Vulkan.
Android Vulkan (Meta Quest)	Implemented and running on a Quest 3: the OpenXR side owns its own Vulkan device (XR_KHR_vulkan_enable2, XR_KHR_vulkan_enable fallback) and shares eyes with Dawn through AHardwareBuffers ordered by sync-fd fences. Controllers arrive through OpenXR actions as a virtual SDL gamepad. See docs/quest-port.md.
Android Vulkan (Steam Frame)	The same backend in the steamFrame flavour, for SteamVR's Android runtime under Lepton: Frame controller profile, 120 Hz request, eye-tracked foveation. Blocked on the headset: Lepton's Turnip exposes no AHardwareBuffer or fd external memory, so the eyes cannot cross devices. The native build below is the supported route. See docs/steam-frame.md.
Linux Vulkan (Steam Frame, SteamOS)	Implemented, not yet run on the headset: the Windows Vulkan design compiled for Linux, so the runtime creates Dawn's own instance and device and the eyes are copied on Dawn's queue with no sharing. Adds the Frame controller profile, 120 Hz and gaze-centred foveation. Needs a Dawn built with Aurora's patches (Launcher/build-dawn-linux.sh), then Launcher/local-build.sh --openxr --dawn-package <dir> --headset steam_frame. See docs/steam-frame.md.
Other platforms	Not wired yet.

Both bindings share openxr_integration.cpp: the pacing thread, policy evaluation, the retained-layer protocol and the head-pose maths are compiled once against the neutral types in vr/openxr_backend.h, and only the backend class differs per platform.

Interpolation validation

Probe-sized EFB readbacks retain completed pixels in host memory and publish them only inside the next compatible GXCopyTex call. GPU completion callbacks must not write to guest RAM: a race restart can reuse a freed probe buffer for RaceCamera, and a late 4x4 Z24X8 tile then turns its rotation fields into NaNs and triggers triangular.h / PPCHalt. The optional Windows GPU test efb_ram_lifetime_smoke exercises that allocation reuse and format/size changes. It fails with the former callback write and passes with deferred publication.

The GX tests cover retained transform endpoints with desktop interpolation off and continuous sampling at 72/90/120 Hz. mkw_frame_interpolation_pacing_tests covers fixed-rate scheduling, live changes, stalls and configuration migration; mkw_openxr_replay_tests exercises swapchain ownership and retained-layer submission without a headset.

For a Windows GPU check, configure Aurora with its tests enabled and AURORA_GPU_SMOKE_TESTS=ON, then build/run stereo_frame_worker_smoke. This feeds the actual renderer a 60 Hz GX stream and an independent 90 Hz stereo provider, with a default 40 ms head-prediction lead to exercise the multi-frame horizon seen in VDXR. The development check produced 359 new stereo submissions in 4 seconds (89.7 FPS). This verifies submission cadence, not full-race performance or visual quality on a headset. Pass a draw count, for example stereo_frame_worker_smoke 2000, to stress uniform preparation and renderer/producer overlap; stereo_frame_worker_smoke 2000 0 checks native stereo with interpolation Off. The fourth and fifth arguments select headset Hz and prediction lead in milliseconds: stereo_frame_worker_smoke 1 1 0 90 65 exercises a 90 Hz headset predicting 65 ms ahead. Add a sixth argument of 1 to rotate the published camera around geometry 100000 units away; stereo_frame_worker_smoke 1000 1 1 90 65 1 combines that with indexed-palette stress. Check camera-separated=true, transform rejection counts and scene cadence together. Add a seventh argument of 1 for CPU-authored particle quads, for example stereo_frame_worker_smoke 1000 1 0 90 65 1 1. Their matrices stay at identity while their vertex centers move. VR interpolation records each four-vertex, direct-F32 quad separately, pairs it across frames by centre and shape, and shifts the current shape to the sampled center. Current texture, colour and shape changes still occur at the game's rate; this is position interpolation, not a particle simulation or a blend between texture animation frames. The smoke's thousand overlapping quads exceed the pairing bound, so they measure decoder and replay cost, not pairing. The GX tests cover pairing: VrSpeedLineEmitterKeepsEachStreakOnItsOwnPath replays a speed-line emitter for 90 frames and prints how many quads moved, were held or were misattributed.

Rigid meshes with a stable basis also reject a large reverse jump relative to their measured, camera-independent velocity. This holds the new phase when an animation resets, instead of interpolating backward through the loop. Coconut Mall's escalator uses a repeating 20-unit phase. Normal direction changes remain interpolated. [vr-motion] reports vertex-motion (usable particle pairs in the latest seal), vertex-held (particle quads drawn where the game put them because no unambiguous partner exists yet) and cumulative wrap-cuts; check those during the affected effects, then confirm the visual result in the headset. The [vr-motion] scene-step range measures actual playback cadence separately from submission FPS. Use stereo_frame_worker_smoke 1000 1 1 to exercise ten-matrix palettes and their larger uniform history, or stereo_frame_worker_smoke 1000 2 1 to switch interpolation On/Off during recording. The test compositor discards obsolete ticks and uses high-resolution waits on Windows, keeping missed ticks from accumulating into bursts. It pre-warms the next game frame like the runtime and excludes the first 60 frames from timing so shader compilation and initial resource allocation do not skew steady-state results. The test checks that the producer stays above 55 FPS as well as checking headset submissions; replaying an old scene more often must not hide a slowed simulation. Validate actual races in VDXR at 90 Hz with Auto/90 selected, including race entry/exit, first person, recentering and pauses.

Stereo uniform calculations use cached CPU memory, followed by a single write into the upload buffer. Reading or modifying matrices directly in D3D12 upload memory can be extremely slow, especially with many character draws; see Microsoft's Map guidance. Retained interpolation reserves eye ranges at seal time and fills them once at the headset sample time. The frame worker always releases the producer after sealing, so eye encoding overlaps the next game frame whether or not interpolation is on. It used to publish that phase only after the encode unless interpolation was enabled, and the producer's first GX drain of every frame then waited for the previous frame's whole encode and submit (3 to 4.5 ms per frame on a Quest 3).

When VR interpolation is enabled at batch start, uniform recording also uses cached CPU memory. Matching and history capture read that buffer, then the used prefix is copied to the mapped upload buffer before unmapping. The backing choice stays fixed until the batch ends, including mid-frame flushes, so live setting changes cannot invalidate pending tasks.

Current limitations

• Only the project's supported PAL RMCP01 translation has race instrumentation addresses.
• The tracked controllers are always Player 1's Wii Remote; there is no left-handed swap, and only the Touch and simple controller profiles have suggested bindings. The Wii Remote presentation still needs headset validation: cursor direction and roll, trick/wheelie motion, rumble strength and the HOME Menu.
• The Quest build (android/, docs/quest-port.md) runs on a Quest 3 through menus and races. Lifecycle events and performance (about 43 game FPS) are still open. Apple visionOS packaging is not implemented.
• Scene-specific comfort options and replay/spectator classification are future work.
• Hand steering works on a Quest 3 (2026-09-22): the kart's own wheel animated (228 draws a frame, the race camera's view matching the scene's exactly) and the wheel can be grabbed and turned. In that race the driver's eye was never calibrated, so the fallback placed the wheel centre about 13 cm above eye level. Bikes and Quacker, and the PC, are still unvalidated. Hand steering needs analog grips (Touch); the simple controller profile cannot grab.
• The headset settings panel has no laser beam, only the cursor on the panel itself, and text fields cannot be typed into without a keyboard.
• On the PC the immersive window renders the whole eye and only masks it, so it costs what a fully immersive race costs. Hands and a separate VR wheel are seen only through the window.
• The desktop window remains available as a mirror/fallback.

OpenXR diagnostics are written to the normal run log under %LOCALAPPDATA%\WiiCompiled\Logs. Search for OpenXR when reporting a startup or submission failure.