At yesterday’s highly-anticipated Apple Worldwide Developers Conference 2017 (WWDC), Apple announced they are embracing virtual reality (VR). The company also demonstrated it on the Vive by enabling the use of SteamVR on Macs with their new MacOS, High Sierra.
Through a newly-announced external GPU, developers and content creators will be able to use a beta of SteamVR and the new MacOS to access the creative power of Vive with their MacBooks. The combination of support for the Vive headset and an external graphics card option means that VR development is about to get a broader, more Apple-friendly footprint.
Apple’s vision for high-end computing and empowering developers matches Vive’s vision of delivering the most advanced and immersive room-scale VR in the market. The new MacOS Beta and the SteamVR for Mac beta is available now with a full release planned for later in the fall.
The announcement further positions Vive as a world leader in driving the VR industry forward. In just the last month alone, the company has partnered with the world’s most prominent and innovative tech giants including Google, Intel and Apple, who are aligning their VR efforts around Vive.
On stage during WWDC, Apple demonstrated their commitment to VR using a Vive with ILM and Unreal running on a Mac in front of thousands of developers. Vive was built to be an open and always growing platform for VR. The Vive ecosystem is expanding through efforts including the more than 60 companies in the global Vive X accelerator program that are defining the future of VR technology, products like the Vive Tracker with new content and experiences for VR, and Viveport, a hardware agnostic content and distribution platform.
