I am looking for a VR headset to work with my macbook.
I heard they don’t exist? But it would be quite simple to stream to a head mounted display from a Mac so I don’t get why it wouldn’t exist?
Is it just the speed of the Mac that is too slow? But then, can’t I just turn down the resolution?
I’m not sure how a VR image is rendered. Is it kind of like the same complexity as real-time raytracing?
There is not mac / MacBook that has a GPU (/CPU) that does fit the minim System requirements for the vr headsets.
For that reason the vr headset manufacturer do not provide any support for mac’s.
VR is just a scene renders twice (for each eye once) that are are position at the position fitting for the headset position.
You need (for the Vive for example) render a resolution of 2160 x 1200 (times 1.4 for internal down scaling) 90 times a second.
If your device does not have the power to push that kind of rending out you will have a very bad expirience.
No, its just normal rending like you would do for a normal unity application.
I was just thinking, to render a 180 degree view that’s about half a skybox, so wouldn’t that be about 3 sides of a box for each eye, or 6 frames rendered in all for reasonable quality? And at 60 fps that would be equivalent of 360fps to render VR! Yep, definitely too much for my Macbook Air.
No, it’s 2160x1200, 90fps. 1080x1200 for each eye. However there are some tricks where it’s not quite the same as actually rendering the scene fully twice. Late last year, Valve said they were planning on releasing Mac and Linux support for the Vive within a few months (so, like, around now?). Linux will use Vulkan; presumably it will require Metal on macOS. However you’d still need a decent GPU no matter how well optimized it is.
–Eric