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Apple is now selling a VR development kit through their developer program. The $599 platform consists of a Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) external GPU chasis, a AMD Radeon RX 580 GPU, and a $100 discount to purchase an HTC Vive VR headset.
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MacOS High Sierra will support external GPUs, potentially making all current Macs VR capable at minimal cost. Nvidia has already released beta drivers for their GPUs that unlock this use case, and as I mentioned the development kit uses an AMD GPU.
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Steam VR is coming to Mac
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Apple has announced ARKit for iOS, an augmented reality framework to simplify development of augmented reality apps.
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Apple has announced VisionKit for iOS, a computer vision framework that uses machine learning on-device. In developer sessions they demonstrated an augmented reality app that could label the dominant element in a scene in real time ("you're looking at a banana", "now you're looking at a microwave", etc)
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Apple has announced an update to its 3D graphics API, Metal, to support VR and external GPUs.
So what do we make of this? In particular I'm interested in the ramifications of external GPUs. Does the fact that Mac users will not need to buy a new machine to support VR make them a wider market than PCs? I am a Mac / iOS expert and professional developer, but I am not an expert on PCs or VR, so I'm interested in people's thoughts.
Submitted June 07, 2017 at 11:25AM by hfutrell http://ift.tt/2rLWnRC
