Will Apple ever support VR hmds like the Rift and Vive?
I really want to switch from winblows to MacOS but the lack of VR support is what is keeping me from making the transition.
It's very odd they haven't made any effort to support virtual reality.
You would think the company that made the ipod and pioneered pocket computers would at least have a commercial AR hmd by now.
You’ll find this in any number of threads here...
The Vive was supported on macOS for SteamVR, but it never made it out of beta. VR is dependent on high-power GPUs connected to a full-fat motherboard slot, and able to be replaced on a regular basis.
Apple ships mediocre Intel & AMD GPUs, expects upgrades to be in bandwidth starved eGPU enclosures, and their only slotbox is buggy as hell with normal retail GPUs. They don’t want to make the sort of machine that is necessary for VR, because fundamentally, they don’t like it as a platform, since it removes their ability to differentiate from Windows, as every VR app is a self contained world with no UI inherited from the host OS. VR is developed in games engines, which makes macOS, and all of Apple’s proprietary technologies, just dumb pipes to the hardware.
On the basis of not providing a user base of VR capable machines, Valve cut their losses, and canned SteamVR for macOS.
VR is the realm of Windows and Nvidia, pure and simple.
The state of the art in AR is Leap Motion’s Project Northstar, it’s bulkier than a VR headset, and that scale isn’t a byproduct of miniaturisable early-generation technologies, but rather the distances light has to travel through lenses to be correctly refocused for close display in human vision.
AR & VR require a balance of three things:
- Graphical fidelity.
- Wide field of view.
- Compact headset.
You can choose two, and companies like the Magic Leap ponzi scheme chose only one (compact headset).
Miniaturising AR is like trying to miniaturise a Phonograph - the volume of the music it produces is a byproduct of how large the resonating chamber, and acoustic horn are.
