Getting the Walksnail Avatar Goggles X to work with a Mac

Getting the Walksnail Avatar Goggles X to work with a Mac is rather annoying, but not quite the impossibility Caddx claim it to be:

The first challenge is dealing with the recessed HDMI-in micro-HDMI connector. In the end, I ordered a cable with a plastic (rather than metal) connector body and shaved it with a knife. It’s ugly, but it fits fine.

Once plugged in, assuming you’ve figured out how to switch inputs [a long ↩ (return) button press], then comes the finicky dance of picking a display mode that the goggles are willing to display. 1920x1080 at 100Hz eventually works fine for me, but it took multiple tries to get there. Initially, I got a solid magenta screen, then noise before it deigned to work. Now, it seems to work consistently, but I have no idea what made it work the first time. As far as I can tell, the HDCP handshake issues that Caddx said were a blocker are resolved in the current firmware. I didn’t need to run through a HDMI splitter to make it work – a direct cable from my MacBook Pro’s HDMI port to the goggles was fine.

Now, once you have a picture, it is all weirdly magenta with messed up colors. That is because the goggles advertise both RGB and YCbCr color modes and the Mac chooses YCbCr, but the goggles don’t really work properly unless in RGB mode. This is apparently a pretty common external display problem that, thankfully, the BetterDisplay utility solves this problem.

Following the instructions, if you have a version of BetterDisplay greater or equal to 3.0.4, there is direct support to change the color mode in the BetterDisplay menu bar item. It’s drama-free and simple (although the goggles sometimes seem to get stuck in a mode and require unplugging and plugging back in for the change to happen).