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It's been almost a year now since Oculus announced that the consumer version of the Rift virtual reality headset would only support Windows PCs at launch—a turnaround from development kits that worked fine on Mac and Linux boxes. Now, according to Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey, it "is up to Apple" to change that state of affairs. Specifically, "if they ever release a good computer, we will do it," he told Shacknews recently.
Basically, Luckey continued, even the highest-end Mac you can buy would not provide an enjoyable experience on the final Rift hardware, which is significantly more powerful than early development kits. "It just boils down to the fact that Apple doesn't prioritize high-end GPUs," he said. "You can buy a $6,000 Mac Pro with the top-of-the-line AMD FirePro D700, and it still doesn't match our recommended specs."
"So if they prioritize 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," he added. "Even if we can support on the software side, there's just no audience that could run the vast majority of software on it."
Source: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/03/oculus-founder-rift-will-come-to-mac-if-apple-ever-release-a-good-computer/.
See also: Shacknews blog.
(Score: 1) by bitstream on Saturday March 05 2016, @06:01AM
Apple decides what hardware they offer so there might actually be a reason to drop support. However machines that run Microsoft Windows can also run most free open source Unixes. And graphic makers ought to be interested in getting into this market so they can fix drivers for their own hardware. Thus hardware is not a reason to drop support for the more popular free Unix variants. One can suspect the reason is perverse incentive regarding the software.. After all no need to fix drivers if the source is available. The free developer kits seems just like "the first one is free" and once tester feedback has been collected those users could unmercifully be dropped.
If you don't have the source. Someone else has you!
If you however take a look at the situation. One could reverse engineer existing hardware like the Oculus Rift. Another possibility is to make an open source virtual reality headset hardware design. And a accompanying source code. The hard part of the headset is in essence two synchronized screens. For which there is standardized hardware to handle.