Overlays in VR

You install a free, open-source tool called OpenKneeboard and point it at your GridCast overlay link. It renders the page and composites it into the frame iRacing is already drawing, so the panel appears in the world with your car rather than on a monitor you can’t see.

OpenKneeboard installs as an OpenXR API layer, which is the part that matters. Because it rides inside the game’s own session, it works on every runtime — Meta’s Link and Air Link runtime, Virtual Desktop’s VDXR, SteamVR, Pimax and Varjo. That is not true of the desktop-pinning overlay tools you may already own; see tools you may already own.

• A GridCast channel with a published overlay theme. A draft won’t render — publishing is what puts a layout on air.
• OpenKneeboard v1.7 or newer. Web Dashboard tabs, which is how a URL becomes a panel, arrived in the v1.7 sim-racing release.
• iRacing running in OpenXR mode (recommended) or SteamVR mode.
• A telemetry source, if you want real numbers rather than the demo state — see feeding it real data.

Start from a VR preset rather than resizing a broadcast theme. A 2560×1440 layout is built to be read across a room on a stream; through a lens a foot from your eyes you want one focused panel with a few large fields. Create a new theme in the overlay editor and choose one of these from the gallery:

They come as three separate layouts on purpose. A headset positions whole panels, not widgets inside them, so anything you want in a different place has to be its own theme. Running all three as three panels is the intended setup, and every one of them is an ordinary editable theme — rearrange, restyle or build your own from the Driver HUD kits once you know where you like things.

In the overlay editor, open the Browser Source Links menu behind the brand mark at the top left and copy the live URL. It’s the same link you’d give OBS — there is no separate VR address. GridCast Lite has it ready to copy on its In VR tab, labelled Overlay URL (OpenKneeboard).

1. Download and install it from openkneeboard.com. The installer offers to launch it when it finishes.
2. Open Settings → Games and check iRacing is listed. If it wasn’t picked up automatically, add iRacingSim64DX11.exe.
3. Leave Rendering API on Auto-detect. If nothing shows up later, come back and set it explicitly to whichever mode iRacing is in — OpenXR or SteamVR.
4. Bind recenter to the same button you use to recenter in iRacing. Don’t skip this one: without it your panels drift out of position every time you re-seat, and you’ll be fixing them mid-session.

1. Go to Settings → Tabs → Add Tab and choose Web Dashboard.
2. Paste your GridCast link.
3. Leave transparency enabled. OpenKneeboard’s browser window is fully transparent and GridCast overlays render on a transparent background, so the panel floats with no black box behind it — no colour keying, no settings.

You don’t need to work out a resolution. GridCast detects that it’s running inside OpenKneeboard and asks for its own canvas size, so the panel arrives at exactly the dimensions the layout was designed at and composites sharp rather than being scaled to something arbitrary.

Repeat for each layout you want as its own panel.

Open Settings → VR. Each view is one floating panel, and the + button to the right of Kneeboard 1 adds more — up to sixteen, depending on the game. Give each view its own default tab and you can run the relative down by the wheel, fuel and delta off to one side, and the spotter low in your peripheral vision.

Looking at a view makes it the active one. You can tune that with the gaze target options in VR settings, or switch it off in advanced settings if you’d rather it stayed put.

Put panels where your eyes already go — beside the wheel, on the virtual dash, low and to one side. Keep them off your mirrors and out of the line to the apex. Cockpit-locked placement beats head-locked: a panel welded to your vision at a fixed depth is uncomfortable to focus on and follows you into every corner.

Worth being straight about: getting a panel into your headset solves where the overlay is drawn, not where its numbers come from. Live telemetry still has to be read out of iRacing by software running on your race PC.

For a driver, that’s GridCast Lite. Leave Read iRacing data from this PC ticked and keep Lite open while you drive: it reads iRacing directly and the overlay picks the data up on its own — nothing to configure and no address to enter. If you’re running a full broadcast, the GridCast Broadcaster on the race PC does the same job.

Without a source, widgets fall back to their demo state and show a small amber DEMO tag. That’s genuinely useful for positioning panels before a session, but it isn’t your fuel or your delta.

If you already use OVR Toolkit, XSOverlay or Desktop+ to pin windows in VR, they can show a GridCast overlay too — but only when SteamVR is the runtime actually rendering your session. They are SteamVR overlays, so on a Quest running through Link or Virtual Desktop, which is a very common iRacing setup, they simply never appear.

That’s the whole reason this guide leads with OpenKneeboard. If you’re on a Steam-native headset and you already have a setup you like, there’s no reason to change it.

Native in-headset rendering — GridCast drawing its own panels with no third-party tool at all — is on the roadmap. This guide is the route that works today, on every runtime, for free.

If you get stuck, the VR section of the help centre covers the questions we get most, and there’s a Discord link at the bottom of that page.