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Apple Opens Up To VR Technology And Introduces It In Macs

Recognizing the need to introduce VR in Apple’s systems, the company has now decided to incorporate the technology in new iOS. The macOS High Sierra, announced at WWDC 2017, is expected to include a major upgrade to Metal APIs.
The APIs will be referred to as Metal 2 and even though it’s a critical step forward, it does not ensure there will be complete VR support offered by every mac automatically.
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What Apple Is Doing As Part Of Its VR Efforts?
What Hardware Options Are Announced?
What Apple Came Up With?

What Apple Is Doing As Part Of Its VR Efforts?

With Ap

ple restricting Augmented Reality to its mobile devices, introducing Virtual Reality in Mac really needs some support to make things go seamlessly. Here we’re referring to Unity & Unreal Engine. You may not find too many Virtual Reality experiences that may be relying on other things and, therefore, ensuring that Unity as well as Unreal work well on Mac, so many VR apps can easily be made available to the Mac users.

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Another major introduction is that of SteamVR. The room-scale VR present on Vive is simply unparalleled, and the Steam VR really makes one huge part of that entire VR ecosystem. And, it’s not just restricted to Vive anymore and offers support for greater number of VR headsets compared to any other such platform available now.

What Hardware Options Are Announced?


Obviously, just software is not enough to bringing Virtual Reality to Mac users. The current line of Apple’s products doesn’t meet any of the requirements for HTC Vive, as they are using old generation GPUs. However, the new MacBook Pro and iMac lines that have been launched by Apple at WWDC 2017 feature new GPUs but still Radeon Pro 560 having 4GB RAM doesn’t quite fulfill the requirements for powering HTC Vive.

So, the Mac users now have a couple of options left to them. First of them is the one introduced by Apple and will come through with the release of macOS High Sierra this year. They will be packing the latest iMac Pro with Radeon Vega GPU that is certainly going to be enough for now to handle Virtual Reality. Other solution, however, is to use external GPU and that means the users will have to buy a separate graphics card and connect it to their Mac using Thunderbolt. Attaching such a card will allow most of the i5 and i7 MacBooks to handle Virtual Reality. To have a clear idea, however, we’ll have to first look at the minimum system requirements for VR for Mac not just from HTC but others as well.

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So, Mac users might have to wait until this Fall to buy their new iMac Pro for $5000 or just spend around $400 for having their VR-ready GPU attached to their Mac. This translates into spending $1200 on HTC Vive as well as other hardware for supporting VR.

What Apple Came Up With?

At this year’s WWDC, Apple came up with some really cool things to show to VR developers and it certainly is a great step forward. But how things will be taken further still depend on quite a few questions that aren’t yet answered completely. These include:

  • How complicated using plug-in graphics card is going to be?
  • How much from SteamVR catalog is going to be available in Mac?
  • Are there going to be any unique VR experiences specific to Mac?
  • What’s going to be the next step from Oculus with VR support now available?

The answers to some of the questions will be available during WWDC course, however, some testing and further exploring might be needed to answer the rest after Metal 2 is made available by Apple. But we’ll have to wait until then and see what kind of VR experience is Apple planning to introduce.

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