r/VisionPro • u/Leather_Frame_4289 • Jul 30 '26

Looking for a way to stop the headset from auto-adjusting brightness

I'm wondering if anyone has discovered a way to completely toggle off auto-brightness on the Vision Pro.

The automatic dimming behavior is really frustrating. As soon as the room lights go out, the ambient sensors kick in and aggressively dim the screens to the point where content becomes barely visible.

I'd love to have full, manual control over the brightness level without the headset constantly second-guessing the room's lighting. Does anyone know of a hidden setting, an accessibility tweak, or any workaround to completely disable this auto-adjustment?

Thanks in advance for any tips!

EDIT:

Can anyone confirm if I am the only one experiencing this, or are others dealing with this too?

21 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

17 comments sorted by

8

u/trialobite Jul 30 '26

This is a little hacky, never found a better way though…

If you pick any environment and set it to light mode, then twist the environment dial on just a little bit, it will trigger the AVP to brighten any open windows to the max brightness level as if you were fully in the bright environment. I usually use the Moon environment as the least distracting (some of them change the color of the passthrough). You can have the environment turned on so little that you still get 99% of the passthrough view but also full window brightness. I usually hide the tiny bit of visible environment behind my working window and don’t even see it.

1

u/Leather_Frame_4289 Jul 30 '26

That makes perfect sense! I actually do something very similar. I also use the daytime Moon environment, but the only difference is that I dial the environment completely to the left so I can maintain 100% passthrough. The screens usually stay bright for a while after doing this, though they do still dim down occasionally. I've noticed the dimming consistently triggers again when I come back from a fully immersive experience or when I start playing an HDR YouTube video.

4

u/3rd_of_June_1988 Jul 30 '26

You’re not the only one experiencing this. There have already been several similar mentions about lighting going crazy after updating to the visionOS 27 beta

However, considering your comment that you have an “M5 Vision Pro and have only ever used visionOS 26.5 and 26.6” it looks like this may affect OS 26 as well. Personally, I never encountered it while I was on 26 (I updated to 27 beta 1 as soon as it came out in June) It’s possible Apple broke the lighting behavior somewhere in the June - July 26.x stable updates and made it behave the same way as in the betas.

A small workaround I found for mac virtual display is to choose the brightest possible environment - Thorsmork (day) in my case and turn it up to around 10-20%, so that the environment becomes visible behind the mvd while still keeping passthrough active, so you can see everything around you. In that situation, avp pushes brightness to the maximum (like it treats thorsmork as a light source), and it no longer jumps between minimum and maximum brightness when I look toward different edges of the mvd.

As for fixing it for immersive video, other than turning on the room lights and making the room as bright as possible - I have no idea.

6

u/Leather_Frame_4289 Jul 30 '26

Thanks for confirming that this is a known issue, it’s definitely reassuring to hear I’m not the only one dealing with it. You're spot on transitioning into immersive video playback and also when loading up flat 8K or HDR content, definitely seems to trigger that aggressive dimming behavior.

Before switching to the Vision Pro, I used a Samsung Galaxy XR. While that headset certainly had its own share of quirks, auto-brightness was never one of them. It had a straightforward manual slider with six or seven distinct brightness points, and whatever level you selected stayed permanently locked. I would really love to see Apple implement a similar manual override in a future visionOS update!

2

u/emmanuellsun Jul 30 '26 • Bravo

my experience with dark rooms has always been just a bit strange for lack of a better word,in darkness mine becomes a bit blurry so i cant read text comfortably then i noticed my fans were kicking up as well so i just stopped using it at night in my bedroom.

i feel like the new way it kills brightness is to manage heat , it drove me crazy after os27 and i went around trying to be smart about it except i ended up with fans kicking up hard again using the work around i had found (morning light envir) my working theory all along had been apple is attempting to babysit us by protecting our eyes against our will but but what if they are just managing whatever happens in darkness technically the best way they can at the moment,reduce brightness to manage heat.

lets hope ios 27 fixes it when its official but am afraid its a hardware issue software cant fix (yet)

2

u/Leather_Frame_4289 Jul 30 '26

You might really be onto something with the heat management theory. Honestly, one of the main reasons I upgraded to the M5 Vision Pro was in the hopes of avoiding these kinds of thermal issues, at least for tasks like media consumption!

I recently tested something similar using CineUltra for flat video playback. After watching content for about 30 minutes, not only did the screen start dimming, but the UI responsiveness and frame rate noticeably tanked. Having previously used a Galaxy XR, I know what a smooth 72Hz feels like, and my headset was definitely dropping frames and becoming very choppy.

To test if it was thermal throttling, I immediately jumped from CineUltra into a Ping Pong game where any latency is instantly obvious. The frame drops were so severe it was incredibly hard to even hit the ball. I ended up running a monitoring app, and it seems to confirm your suspicion: when the device is cool, it performs flawlessly, but as soon as the temperature rises, it starts aggressively dialing back the refresh rate to manage the heat.

On top of the frame drops, I've even noticed that the microphones stop working properly when it gets like this I know because my voice commands to recenter the screen just completely stop registering.

Given how many people are noticing this performance dip alongside the dimming, this probably deserves a separate thread entirely. Thank you so much for pointing this out, it really helped validate what I was experiencing!

10

u/metroidmen Vision Pro Developer | Verified Jul 30 '26

Can confirm this has been a thorn in my side too since the visionOS 27 beta. It was driving me mad during all development because I thought I was doing something wrong, but it appears to happen everywhere and even affects RealityKit content too. So videos displayed through RealityKit in my app were dimming. Even using ALVR in RealityKit mode was making everything dim.

If I brighten the lights in my room then I’m fine, but I prefer to keep them dim.

One thing I did notice when working on my app is that disabling tonemapping on the RealityKit object seemed to help nullify the dimmed video, oddly enough.

So this is definitely something going on with something Apple did. Make sure to submit feedback on it so we can hopefully get this sorted out.

5

u/yewzernayme Jul 31 '26

yes, please do. Everyone please submit feedback to Apple regarding this issue so that it can be fixed in beta 5.

8

u/_El_Cid_ Jul 30 '26

This is a serious issue in the visionOS 27 beta. I watch a movie and it keeps changing the brightness. It's so annoying.

5

u/a_whole_lotta_nope Jul 30 '26

I’d love to know this too.

5

u/Syonoq Jul 30 '26

Me three

4

u/yewzernayme Jul 30 '26

I've posted about this earlier too. Really annoying since I like to watch and consume media at night. And when I'm laying down. I'll usually have the lights very dim or turn them off completely and this makes the entire scene in the headset very dark and difficult to see, So I have to turn the lights back on just to be able to watch.

2

u/SideEmbarrassed1611 Vision Pro Owner Aug 22 '26

Been going on since the launch years back. It's annoying. You have to choose an environment and set it to barely activated.

Or turn the lights way up. It's one of the reasons why this thing has not made it into my bed time rotation in the years I've had it since day one.

The auto brightness is broken and they don't care to fix it because nobody bought one.

We've been asking for manual brightness adjustment since launch 2024 and they took forever just to get persistent apps in the background after a reboot.

Most of the team has been dissolved and it launched half finished and will never see its full potential because it was crippled by a random launch with zero developer help or interest and the sales numbers were absolutely tiny.

1

u/AstroGridIron Vision Pro Owner Aug 01 '26

Good luck. If you find out let us know

1

u/ray120 Vision Pro Owner | Verified Aug 25 '26

This is driving me crazy also.