Oculus founder Palmer Luckey said that it “is up to Apple” to “release a good computer” if they ever hope to see support for the Oculus Rift on Mac OS X when he spoke to Shacknews recently. The interview is embedded below.
“If [Apple] ever releases a good computer, we will do it. It just boils down to the fact that Apple doesn’t prioritize high-end GPUs,” Luckey said to Shacknews. “You can buy a $6,000 Mac Pro with the top of the line AMD FirePro D700s, and it still doesn’t match our recommended specs.”
The virtual reality headset is slated to start shipping to consumers March 28, but pre-orders are still open for the VR headset (located here). The device, however, is “sold out for months” according to Luckey.
As Ars Technica pointed out, the Oculus Rift development kits used to support both Mac OS X and Linux runtimes, but the company announced that the headset would switch to only supporting Windows PC systems about a year ago.
“If [Apple] prioritizes higher-end GPUs like they used to for a while back in the day, we’d love to support Mac. But right now, there’s just not a single machine out there that supports it,” said Luckey to Shacknews. “So even if we can support it on the software side, there’s just no audience of people that can run the mass majority of software out there.”
Currently, both the Oculus Rift and its competitor, the HTC Vive, require very high-end computing systems to be able to smoothly run applications and graphically intensive games. More details are available here, but the companies have released tools to automatically check system compatibility: HTC Vive Tool; Oculus Rift Tool.
Apple hasn’t responded to a request for comment about what Luckey had to say about them, but to the tech giant’s credit, Apple has expressed interest in developing their own VR technology for the Apple ecosystem. Apple recently hired the nationally renowned AR/VR researcher Dr. Doug Bowman from the position of director at Virginia Tech’s Center for Human-Computer interaction, and have assembled a “secret research unit” to study possible applications of AR/VR that numbers in the 100s, according to the Financial Times.
“Look, if we were the only people this industry, that’d probably be a scary indicator, because it would mean that other people didn’t see what we’re seeing,” Luckey said to Shacknews. “There’s a lot of people, from companies like teeny-tiny–one-man teams all the way up to big, multi-hundred–billion-dollar corporations, [that] believe that VR is going to be the next major computing platform.”
“The fact that there is other people jumping into the VR space shows that VR is something people believe in it,” said Luckey to Shacknews. “Once they try it, they believe in it.”
Other notable potential players in the virtual reality world include Microsoft’s $3,000 Hololens , the Samsung Gear VR (bundled with every pre-order of the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S7), the PlayStation VR headset and whatever Google seems to be cooking up.
