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chfilm

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Nov 15, 2012
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Hey guys,

I'm very excited as a filmmaker about this piece of software called "cinetracer" and the newly added option to use HTC vive controllers to control the virtual camera inside that tool.
How I understand the HTC Vive headset itself is not supported under Mac OS.. but does anybody know if the controller itself might work? The developer himself doesn't know and didnt provide any information on that yet.. Anybody here playing with this system?
 

mattspace

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Jun 5, 2013
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Australia
Hey guys,

I'm very excited as a filmmaker about this piece of software called "cinetracer" and the newly added option to use HTC vive controllers to control the virtual camera inside that tool.
How I understand the HTC Vive headset itself is not supported under Mac OS.. but does anybody know if the controller itself might work? The developer himself doesn't know and didnt provide any information on that yet.. Anybody here playing with this system?

You've got it backwards, the original Vive is the only headset that is officially supported by Apple (though allegedly SteamVR for Mac is dead in the water / Abandonware), but you'd want to check whether Apple's driver was blacklisted on older systems.
 
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chfilm

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Nov 15, 2012
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You've got it backwards, the original Vive is the only headset that is officially supported by Apple (though allegedly SteamVR for Mac is dead in the water / Abandonware), but you'd want to check whether Apple's driver was blacklisted on older systems.
Hmmmm, yea I remember that there was this big announcement back with the imac pro, but now on the HTC VIVE website I find zero mac information. Their support search even outputs 0 mac search result, and as operating system there's only windows listed..
 

mattspace

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Jun 5, 2013
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Hmmmm, yea I remember that there was this big announcement back with the imac pro, but now on the HTC VIVE website I find zero mac information. Their support search even outputs 0 mac search result, and as operating system there's only windows listed..

Yeah, HTC probably isn't putting any effort into maintaining any sort of compatibility testing or marketing.
 

MarkC426

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May 14, 2008
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Hmmmm, yea I remember that there was this big announcement back with the imac pro, but now on the HTC VIVE website I find zero mac information. Their support search even outputs 0 mac search result, and as operating system there's only windows listed..
There never was ’anything’ on the htc website about Mac support, even when it was supported (through steam).
It is news to me though that Mac support has stopped with steam......:mad:
 

chfilm

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So HTC support chat was writing to me they don‘t recommend using any VIVE products with MAC OS. Still no definitive answer if it could work or not though...
 

mattspace

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Jun 5, 2013
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There never was ’anything’ on the htc website about Mac support, even when it was supported (through steam).
It is news to me though that Mac support has stopped with steam......:mad:

This is the best source I've seen on SteamVR for Mac's seeming standstill:


Though, I think the author gets it wrong in blaming Valve for not pursuing the project - VR relies on a userbase of high-powered GPUs, and is the one place where the limitations of eGPU are most likely to show up. Apple has no mobile systems capable of doing VR on their own, and their highest end desktop up until recently (iMac Pro), had what could only be described as a 4th-rate GPU when it comes to VR capabilities when it was new, let alone years later when this piece was written.

Valve had no reason to develop SteamVR for an effectively non-existent market.
 
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gabrielefx

macrumors member
Feb 15, 2020
62
47
Install Windows 10 (bootcamp). I have a lot of apps running on Windows 10, for example Unity and the latest HDRP feature not available on the MacOS version because it uses the RTX gpus (realtime raytracing)
I've also installed 2 RTXs inside my Mac Pro 7.1 they work great.
 
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chfilm

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Nov 15, 2012
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This is the best source I've seen on SteamVR for Mac's seeming standstill:


Though, I think the author gets it wrong in blaming Valve for not pursuing the project - VR relies on a userbase of high-powered GPUs, and is the one place where the limitations of eGPU are most likely to show up. Apple has no mobile systems capable of doing VR on their own, and their highest end desktop up until recently (iMac Pro), had what could only be described as a 4th-rate GPU when it comes to VR capabilities when it was new, let alone years later when this piece was written.

Valve had no reason to develop SteamVR for an effectively non-existent market.
Let's hope that they will eventually come around, now that we have the Mac Pro. It's just a shame!
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This is the best source I've seen on SteamVR for Mac's seeming standstill:


Though, I think the author gets it wrong in blaming Valve for not pursuing the project - VR relies on a userbase of high-powered GPUs, and is the one place where the limitations of eGPU are most likely to show up. Apple has no mobile systems capable of doing VR on their own, and their highest end desktop up until recently (iMac Pro), had what could only be described as a 4th-rate GPU when it comes to VR capabilities when it was new, let alone years later when this piece was written.

Valve had no reason to develop SteamVR for an effectively non-existent market.
But then you read articles like this one:
does that mean that even though it's not officially supported anymore, it somehow works? It would be so cool!
 
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mattspace

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Jun 5, 2013
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Let's hope that they will eventually come around, now that we have the Mac Pro. It's just a shame!

The problem is, the highest end GPUs supported by macOS, effectively require a Mac Pro as a dongle, and in terms of capability to generate and sustain complex VR environments, they're not going to be good enough in either raw performance, or price / performance, to attract enough users to justify Valve's development costs.

If Apple built a slotbox machine that was ~US$2k with a 2080-equivilent GPU, that could take 2080ti & titan-equivilent GPUs (and in terms of equivilence, we're talking about the actual VR game engine performance achieved), and was user-upgradable with standard off-the-shelf GPUs, they'd attract users, and Steam would deploy resources. Apple would cannibalise iMac Sales, but Valve is only looking at potential seats with big GPUs, and upgradable GPUs in defining their addressable market.

That's exactly what happened with the Macbook Pro, prior to the butterfly keyboards. Even if you installed Windows on it, it was a really good laptop (not for VR or Gaming, but the principle holds - it was a premium standard PC, and it brought people to macOS by being a better, no-compromises PC).

But then you read articles like this one:
does that mean that even though it's not officially supported anymore, it somehow works? It would be so cool!

Apple supports the Vive insofar as the system will recognise what it is when plugged in, and their apps will interact with it, but the SteamVR system which provides the positional tracking etc is what Steam has more or less given up on, if Cindori's account is to be believed.

Realistically, there's no point is trying to do VR on a Mac - at the moment, the best you can hope for is to spend 5x as much, to reach a lower maximum performance than a relatively low-end machine, with a big Nvidia GPU, running Windows.

A core i7/i9 system with a 2080ti, and a Valve Index - that's your best quality (without buying a headset that costs as much as a Mac Pro) to price ratio VR console, and you can treat it as an appliance peripheral to make / process content. Share its drive and default app save locations across to your Mac (because a lot of VR apps have only rudimentary open / save features - almost like the way iOS apps would only save documents to their own directory).

Remember, your VR experience is independent of the operating system you're using - Mac or Windows, it'll look the same in the VR workspace, there's no standard system chrome or behaviours to prefer the "mac way" or "windows way".
 
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dawindmg08

macrumors regular
Sep 25, 2008
182
78
Los Angeles
Just chiming in with my experience:
I got an HTC Vive in May and upgraded to a new 16" MBP right after that. I created a Bootcamp partition and I was able to use the headset in Windows 10 inside that (Steam and Viveport) but getting anything to work in macOS is a mystery. When I plug in the headset it shows a green light, and the laptop screen blinks like it does when a second monitor has been attached, and it shows up as a USB device in System Report (though not as a display) -- but that's it. It doesn't show up as a VR display in Adobe apps like Premiere or After Effects and I'm guessing it wouldn't show up in Unity either. In the past I tried Steam on MacOS with the old VR beta driver but got nothing (in Mojave on a different Mac).

I'm not sure what else to try at this point. What's really frustrating is that there's almost no information out there. All of the "it works!" articles are from last year when it was supported under High Sierra, but nothing recent beyond the announcement of it being dropped from active development. I can't find anyone on the boards who's gotten it to work, and most of the time the VR peeps in places like Reddit are just like, "get a PC."

Super frustrating.
 
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MarkC426

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May 14, 2008
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Yeah before this steam rubbish, the old rift dk2 worked like a dream.
Installed the Mac driver from oculus and bam another display in prefs.
Unfortunately this stopped working a few MacOS versions back.
 
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chfilm

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Nov 15, 2012
3,428
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Berlin
Just chiming in with my experience:
I got an HTC Vive in May and upgraded to a new 16" MBP right after that. I created a Bootcamp partition and I was able to use the headset in Windows 10 inside that (Steam and Viveport) but getting anything to work in macOS is a mystery. When I plug in the headset it shows a green light, and the laptop screen blinks like it does when a second monitor has been attached, and it shows up as a USB device in System Report (though not as a display) -- but that's it. It doesn't show up as a VR display in Adobe apps like Premiere or After Effects and I'm guessing it wouldn't show up in Unity either. In the past I tried Steam on MacOS with the old VR beta driver but got nothing (in Mojave on a different Mac).

I'm not sure what else to try at this point. What's really frustrating is that there's almost no information out there. All of the "it works!" articles are from last year when it was supported under High Sierra, but nothing recent beyond the announcement of it being dropped from active development. I can't find anyone on the boards who's gotten it to work, and most of the time the VR peeps in places like Reddit are just like, "get a PC."

Super frustrating.
Mehhh! Thanks for sharing though
 

kaspitz

macrumors newbie
Jul 5, 2020
1
0
Just chiming in with my experience:
I got an HTC Vive in May and upgraded to a new 16" MBP right after that. I created a Bootcamp partition and I was able to use the headset in Windows 10 inside that (Steam and Viveport) but getting anything to work in macOS is a mystery. When I plug in the headset it shows a green light, and the laptop screen blinks like it does when a second monitor has been attached, and it shows up as a USB device in System Report (though not as a display) -- but that's it. It doesn't show up as a VR display in Adobe apps like Premiere or After Effects and I'm guessing it wouldn't show up in Unity either. In the past I tried Steam on MacOS with the old VR beta driver but got nothing (in Mojave on a different Mac).

I'm not sure what else to try at this point. What's really frustrating is that there's almost no information out there. All of the "it works!" articles are from last year when it was supported under High Sierra, but nothing recent beyond the announcement of it being dropped from active development. I can't find anyone on the boards who's gotten it to work, and most of the time the VR peeps in places like Reddit are just like, "get a PC."

Super frustrating.


How has your VIVE system been working on the Bootcamp partition? If it is working well, what are the specs on your MBP? Thanks!
 

mattspace

macrumors 68040
Jun 5, 2013
3,344
2,975
Australia
Just chiming in with my experience:

I'm not sure what else to try at this point. What's really frustrating is that there's almost no information out there. All of the "it works!" articles are from last year when it was supported under High Sierra, but nothing recent beyond the announcement of it being dropped from active development. I can't find anyone on the boards who's gotten it to work, and most of the time the VR peeps in places like Reddit are just like, "get a PC."

Yup, SteamVR for macOS was announced as discontinued at the beginning of May (having been moribund for ages prior), so support on any operating system newer than when SteamVR was last actively updated, which would likely be High Sierra, is never going to happen.

get a PC is the best solution, even if all you use it for, is as an appliance to drive the VR. Realistically, aside from SteamVR ending, there was never much in the way of Mac-compatible VR titles - even some of the launch titles Apple was promoting with the release of the iMac Pro never actually released on macOS.
 
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