> The visionOS platform doesn't have OpenGL support, as it's not supported by visionOS.
Hell would freeze over before Apple conformed and contributed to an existing open standard. They even failed to follow the Godot contribution guide for the PR itself.
> Hell would freeze over before Apple conformed and contributed to an existing open standard.
Better get some blankets because Apple has made significant contributions to many open standards - for example, USB-C. And, back in the day, OpenGL.
Its a mistake to think of a large company like apple as if it were a person, with their own goals and ideas. Apple is just too big for that. I mean, they have 164,000 staff. Thats big enough that "small" business units will still have thousands of people. So each area will end up creating its own culture, and have its own way of doing things.
The graphics division - these days - seems very intent on doing their own thing. But that doesn't tell us much about the rest of apple. 164 000 people is a lot of people. That's an awful lot of different opinions about open standards.
> The graphics division - these days - seems very intent on doing their own thing.
Apple is a top-down hierarchy with ruthless business strategy. Not a value judgment; merely a fact to keep in mind when entering a business relationship with Apple.
Mike Rockwell, serves as the Vice President of the Vision Products Group. Rockwell has been instrumental in spearheading the Vision Pro project and the underlying visionOS platform. His leadership has been pivotal in advancing Apple’s spatial computing initiatives.
To think he and his team have not made intentional choices to support/advance or undermine OpenXR would be naïve in my view.
Not relevant. The VisionOS crew have decided to not support OpenXR and Apple has broadly decided not to support Vulkan, which, together with DirectX are the primary VR rendering technologies.
Not relevant to what? I think we’re talking past each other.
I agree with your point - Apple clearly wants Metal & friends to be their own thing. But the comment I was replying to above commented on Apple and standards. It didn’t mention graphics at all. I replied, discussing Apple as a whole.
> The VisionOS crew have decided to not support OpenXR and Apple has broadly decided not to support Vulkan
Because they already have their own graphics API called Metal. Why aren't you asking Microsoft to drop DirectX and start first-party support for Vulkan?
If Apple wanted Metal to be a success then they'd need Windows devices to support it, and ideally a console too (like DirectX with Xbox).
There's a lot of bad things you can say about Vulkan's market position relative to DirectX, but it's clearly more successful than Metal. More games and work applications are written in it. I don't see what Apple gains from going their own way. Maybe Vulkan will rot by committee like OpenGL once did, but that hasn't happened yet.
Even without a standard, people will create abstractions on top so all you need to do is add support to those abstractions. If needing to conform to a standard was hampering Apple's ability to get developers to make software for their platforms they would add support. It's obviously not materially affecting them.
I think this whole thread is besides the point anyway.
VisionOS doesn't support VR gaming at a basic controller level. All it can do is the same traditional console controllers that other Apple devices support (PlayStation, Switch, Xbox, etc).
Metal vs. DirectX vs. Vulkan isn't the problem, the basic input devices and lack of interoperability with other non-graphics VR tooling/SDKs are the problem.
I know that Apple doesn't see it as a gaming device and mostly sucks at interfacing with the non-mobile gaming sphere, but if they had come out of the gate with messaging that was more like "We have built-in support for popular VR controllers, game developers can just do XYZ simple thing to port their games to VisionOS," they would have had some immediate momentum to help bolster the other select few things the device excels at.
But as it stands, nobody can make any of the kinds of abstractions you are referring to because the hardware is not capable of using the basic input devices that VR games depend on. Full stop.
Instead, prospective buyers are almost certainly comparing the Vision Pro with devices like the Meta Quest Pro and thinking "well, the Apple thing does some Apple stuff that nothing else can do, but I can't even play any occasional VR games on my Vision Pro and it's literally the most expensive headset money can buy."
The truth of the matter is that a Quest 3 can do pass-through vision, VR web content, and web browsing along with a decent selection of non-gaming apps at a tiny fraction of the cost of a Vision Pro and you don't even lose all that much due to it being less premium and advanced.
Even if we are comparing against a hypothetical $999 future Vision device where the external battery is gone and it weighs less it still doesn't compare all that well in that context. An analogy would be like if the iPhone wasn't allowed to make video calls and Android was. Maybe I don't use video calling every day but I can't justify buying a phone that doesn't have a feature like that as a concept.
IMO Apple thinks that controlling the device with just the hands and no controllers is the future. They feel like they have the iPhone all over again and that all the competitors using the metaphorical stylus and built-in keyboard are wrong. But as we found out with the iPad, sometimes a specialized input device (Apple Pencil) does serve a specific subset of customers very well to the point where it's considered a basic necessity.
Most of those games could be written to run on a toaster. Most of those games are written by people who use Unity, so they don't really care about the underlying system and may not even understand what Metal is at all.
The reality is that virtual reality and gaming technology have largely converged on DirectX and Vulkan for rendering.
I can empathize with Apple’s desire to get more adoption of Metal, but I predict it is an uphill battle to insist on it on platforms like spatial computing that is already having a very hard time to win adoption.
I think people are (rightfully) upset at the business-oriented decisions that limit MacOS as a platform, prevent competition on iOS and demand annual tithes from their developers like they're peons tilling land for coin. These are fair criticisms, prosecuted in a few courts even, and well within the realm of reasonable change.
Apple makes great things for their users when they collaborate with the industry. That's why we're concerned when they abandon standards and demand convergence on suspicious centralized cloud crap.
Maybe I'm biased as I was involved with the standardization - but the whole point of a standard is something is legally possible to implement, communicates the needed information to the layer below, and general enough that it doesn't require specific hardware.
All boxes are checked by Vulkan? At least that was the intention.
So what if the origin of Vulkan was AMD's donation of Mantle, and the committee knocked the "hardware specific" points off - isn't that the desired result?
I lost a Mac laptop in the pre-MagSafe days, to a bullpen environment –a sysadmin was rushing to a meeting, snagged his foot, and took the cable and the laptop off the desk at high speeds.
After that, I was a big fan of MagSafe, but today’s USB-C and better batteries situation solves a lot of problems that MagSafe did in a different way. It allows for you to have multiple reasonably priced chargers, so the one on your desk can be safely placed, with a short unsnaggable cable. And you can still go to meetings and take your laptop home – because you have another cable in your bag and another at home.
So these days, I barely use the MagSafe cable on my MacBook Pro.
I agree with you, but in practice I've never had a problem with USB-C at all and everything mobile I own has USB-C except my face trimmer, and the next one will be USB-C for sure.
If you're worried about the port in a classroom environment you can use a short extension that you plug in on the device end, it will make the connection separate much easier if something unfortunate happens.
Come on. USB-C has been shipped on MacBooks since 2015, and most of their other systems since ~2020. Heck they caught a bunch of flack when they killed MagSafe on their MacBooks and went USB-C only (not just for the lack of mag safe, but also plenty of grief for lack of Ethernet and HDMI too). With or without the EU mandates they were clearly on a trend moving their devices to USB-C
OpenGL is quite dated for VR/AR. In the Apple ecosystem they supported OpenGL 4.1 for quite some time before moving to Metal, which was announced 2 years before Vulkan.
If you spent the time developing an in house graphics API since open standards weren’t moving forward, why would you rewrite everything a second time just a few years later? Shouldn’t you expect to get a decade or two out of your existing API and only do the massive rewrite when the benefits become more substantial?
Vulkan & OpenGL applications can translate to Metal with MoltenGL and MoltenVK, respectively.
Vulkan and DirectX are the favored graphics rendering technologies for VR.
Godot supports Vulkan rendering via OpenXR.
To get a vibe for Apple’s general posture in this regard it is worth noting that Vulkan rendering through OpenXR on macOS is technically possible via MoltenVK, but macOS does not have an official OpenXR runtime. You’d need to use third-party workarounds or wait for broader support.
> If you spent the time developing an in house graphics API since open standards weren’t moving forward, why would you rewrite everything a second time just a few years later? Shouldn’t you expect to get a decade or two out of your existing API and only do the massive rewrite when the benefits become more substantial?
I have a natural inclination to agree with this thinking, but I think it's important to recognize that this is the sunk cost fallacy at work[1].
In an ideal world, Apple would have just built DirectX and sold the Xbox too. But you can't look at it from an executive's perspective, you have to look at it from the developer's point-of-view. This insistence on high-investment, low-ROI APIs is why the Mac doesn't have games. If you run the Metal playbook with VR again, you will have developers outright abandon you. We've already seen what happens.
Apple's GPUs support a decent chunk of the Vulkan featureset, you can go boot it up on an M1 with Asahi. Same goes for OpenXR. These are things that Apple neglects because they want to use their customerbase as leverage to market proprietary APIs. This hurts users, because Apple has neither industry-leading standards nor the leverage to force the industry to adapt. And they sure as hell lack the humility to just support both in the name of fair competition.
APIs are the last reason there aren't 'major' games on macOS. You've got architecture changes; PPC to Intel was a big loss of game compatibility, and then again when x86-32 support was removed from OS X nuked most of a user's Steam library.
And there's the chicken/egg problem of gamers just not being present in large enough numbers on macOS. The platform already has a fairly small marketshare in the overall PC space, the number of gamers are vanishingly much smaller; Steam stats put macOS at 1.58%, less than Linux.
APIs are the exact reason. Why can't you run Proton on MacOS? WoW64 works. Rosetta and Wine work. Is there any technical limitation besides API support preventing the Macbook from working like a Steam Deck?
Proton relies on Linux sys APIs not available on macOS, but the Porting Toolkit is available. I've been able to "play" Noita on my M2 Air (granted the perf sucks, but that's what I get for owning an Air). This discussion hasn't been centered around kernel APIs, but rather graphics APIs (D3D/Vulkan), if you're going for that "gotcha!".
Crossover is another option, though I have no need to pay for it as I own a Windows PC/consoles.
It’s more that devs can’t be arsed to write non-mobile games in anything but DirectX unless they’re being paid to (as the console vendors do). Vulkan support is quite rare in commercial games, it’s almost entirely DirectX or Sony/Nintendo’s things. If Apple somehow flipped a switch that turned on Vulkan support, almost nothing would change.
The single biggest things Apple could do to bolster gaming on their platforms is to pay studios to do it or for Apple to license DirectX from MS. Anything else will barely move the needle.
> If Apple somehow flipped a switch that turned on Vulkan support, almost nothing would change.
That's not entirely true. Whiskey being depreciated to support Codeweavers was a headline story this week - something that outright would not need to exist if Apple users could run upstream DXVK instead of GPTk.
> pay studios to do it or for Apple to license DirectX from MS.
That doesn't work either! Paying Eidos and Capcom and Hello Games did not start an avalanche of ports. Apple could license DirectX from Microsoft, but they could also just support Vulkan 1.2 and get perfect DX12 coverage through translation.
The bigger point is that the Metal-only route isn't working. We can argue over the merits of Vulkan until the cows come home, but the simple issue is that Metal doesn't get ports. Native APIs on Apple platforms just get ignored.
The bigger point is that the Metal-only route isn't working.
For macOS, no. For iOS, yes, and that's where Apple makes almost all their revenue. Apple wants your primary target to be iOS. If you decide to do a macOS port, that's nice but not essential. Of course this doesn't work for AAA games, but that's a sacrifice they're happy to make.
In this context, what’s relevant is OpenXR. Apple’s visionOS does not natively support OpenXR, the open standard developed by the Khronos Group for cross-platform AR/VR development. Apple has not indicated any plans to adopt OpenXR, choosing instead to promote its proprietary frameworks such as ARKit, RealityKit, and PolySpatial for spatial computing on the Vision Pro.
What Apple is finding, however, is that there’s virtually no consumer or developer appetite for visionOS / Vision Pro.
An excellent comment for it's humor value. (not to ruin the humor with an explanation, but this is a masterful use of sophistry as it's logically sound, but clearly not a serious argument).
Now to add to the unhelpfulness in what I hope is a humorous way, we in fact have some evidence that hell did freeze over:
Ahhh Khronos. Lovely Fahrenheit where Microsoft strung SGI along to make Fahrenheit fail (now Open Scene Graph) and incorporate the IP in Direct3D..
Shitty tactics.
It's a miracle they actually allowed Microsoft to be a member of the Khronos group.
I should try an make an image of Fahrenheit's beta cds some day.
It's my impression that the WebGPU spec design team went to extreme lengths to accommodate Apple's wishes, and Apple in turn does not even support WebGPU in Safari. Why not express vitriol? Apple does not seem to act in good faith.
Confirmed my M1 iPad Pro iOS 18.4.1 also doesn’t have it enabled. Took a bit of digging in the settings app to discover where to enable feature flags too, confirmed it’s off.
It’s disabled still on my iPhone on iOS 18.4.1. Either it was enabled specifically on 18.2, and then disabled, or you enabled it manually. (Or some other weird thing, like it’s only enabled on iPhone Pros.)
That's kind of the point, Chrome shipped it across multiple platforms two years ago, while Safari still has no timeframe despite having a much narrower set of APIs and hardware to support. Firefox at least has the excuse of needing broad compatibility like Chrome but with a fraction of the development resources. Apple are just dragging their feet.
> That's kind of the point, Chrome shipped it across multiple platforms two years ago
Chrome ships a lot of things. Even now WebGPU is marked as experimental technology on MDN.
WebGPU didn't even become a Candidate Recommendation until December 2024 (half a year ago)
> Apple are just dragging their feet.
Or they are not in any rush to implement APIs that haven't reached consensus, haven't passed reviews, are subject to change etc. Chrome has very very cavalier attitude towards shipping APIs.
> Cross-platform dev is for low-rent chumps, unless it's our cross-platform dev
From an article talking about their decision to build WebGPU[1]. I was definitely being dramatic, but do think that Apple's overall vibe doesn't mesh well with open standards.
Those are fantastic examples.
At the same time it begs the question: why does Apple not play nicely with graphics standards? It could be that the those standards bodies are dysfunctional or too slow so Apple has to go their own way. However, I suspect that that is not the main reason.
> I would insist Apple conforms to the industry standard
Insisting Apple conforms to anything is useless, unless you're in control of government regulations.
You can stick to Apple's ridiculous custom APIs, or you can release your software without Apple support. Luckily, VisionOS seems to have gone the way of the Apple Pippin, so I don't think many people will care much about Apple's headsets not being supported by VR games. Apple certainly doesn't.
If Godot wants VisionOS support, this is probably the way to do it. The question then becomes: is an alteration this heavy worth the maintenance cost, especially for hardware that expensive and uncommon? You don't want to end up in a situation where the one guy with such a headset falls ill and suddenly you can't test your engine anymore without spending a couple thousand on new hardware.
It's a pretty well self regulating issue, isn't it? If there is no maintainer available, there's no market either, so it could be dropped. If there's enough people to develop for this expensive uncommon system, then surely there's enough money going round to pay someone.
Right now it looks like they have enough first party support and third party dyi efforts to at least give it a go.
There were rumors indicating that they were working on the AVP for almost a decade before it was announced. With Apple, rumors have less to do with an imminent release and more to do with marketing, particularly to investors: such gossip placates those who are getting antsy that Apple might get left behind, especially when (as with VR) other big tech names like Facebook and Google are obviously moving to box Apple out.
If VisionOS comes back, it will be in a "Prey" or "Marathon"-like manner (or, best-scenario, A User Environment Reborn).
Okay? That still doesn’t mitigate the need for this specific PR first though to even get to that discussion point. That line you mention is not part of the contents of this PR.
A good partner discusses startegy and shared interest first, negotiates terms of engagement, tradeoffs, shared roadmaps, etc.
Instead we get a pretty arrogant and presumptive interaction from the Apple crew.
It should be noted that Apple is struggling with visionOS and Pro adoption amongst consumers and developers, so their arrogance is unwarranted and they cannot rely on market power.
It feels like we're reading different discussions. All I see is Apple engineers addressing every raised concern.
Getting angry at companies for contributing to OSS is not the hill to die on. If it is -- I can't even imagine your feelings towards Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, Google, etc. for their contributions to Linux.
That’s what this PR is! It’s a first attempt to start that dialogue. You can even see the employee trying to address notes as they come in, and asking if there are better ways they should align with Godot.
Point to the arrogance involved. From all your comments I can see you have an intense distaste for Apple and I honestly feel it’s colouring your perception of this change.
The only person who seems upset is you. The Godot maintainers are positive, Miguel is positive.
Should contributors never open PRs until they’ve discussed it first? What if they want to get feedback on an idea in code form?
If Godot does nothing and insists that it's on Apple to to support OpenXR, then VR developers who want to support the Vision Pro will have to use Unity or Unreal or some other non-Godot engine. It achieves nothing other than to reduce Godot's relevance. Godot isn't big enough to pressure Apple.
I agree. I'm just saying that the result of responding "no, we won't accept this PR because we won't support visionOS until it supports OpenXR" only results in Godot not support ion visionOS. It doesn't result in visionOS gaining OpenXR support.
Now that doesn't mean it would be the wrong choice for the Godot project, they don't have to support visionOS.
This indicates to me that the Apple Vision and visionOS product line and OS are not canceled internally and that Apple is still committed to its future.
While the Apple Vision Pro itself is not a good or successful product, progress in display technology will enable Apple to build a more attractive consumer product, in the form of light, comfortable and unobtrusive AR glasses.
In this line of thinking — not just focusing on the flopped AVP but looking at the product line on the long term - I think it makes sense for this OS to be added to Godot.
I do think the concern for who will carry the maintenance burden is valid. In my experience, Apple hasn’t been the most responsive company when it comes to obscure bugs or issues with their API (e.g. with Cocoa). I would be wary of depending on continued support from a large tech company that can change its goals at any time.
> While the Apple Vision Pro itself is not a good ... product
I must admit I'm baffled by this reaction to the first model:
* It's clearly far more impressive technologically than any competitor.
* The price point clearly indicates it wasn't aimed at the general consumer, which is normal for such a massive technological leap compared to their other recent consumer stuff (e.g. the apple watch).
* They got loads of feedback
* Nobody who is this critical seems to articulate what success would have looked like.
> in the form of light, comfortable and unobtrusive AR glasses.
This just seems like a fantasy. I don't understand why people expect this is possible. Battery alone precludes this. Even just streaming video back and forth is going to be too power-hungry for serious use with lightweight glasses.
The Vision Pro could easily have been successful if they'd invested an additional 10% of it's R&D budget into software development, and released a suite of tools that actually leveraged what the platform was capable of.
It's incredibly impressive tech but just not worth it if all there is to do is to have ipad apps floating in the air around me.
It does a lot more than iPad apps. Coexisting 3-D volumetric apps with 2D app is quite innovative and not even an android XR will be able to do that in its first release. What’s software development tools do you think it’s missing?
Honestly yes. It's by far the highest quality implementation of 3D TV or 3D Film I have ever viewed. Avatar 2 and IMAX films in particular are stupendous. I really don't have an adjective to describe how much better stereo content in the VisionPro is over every other display device or theater.
Exactly. 3D TV wasn’t a bad idea. It was just pushed a bit too hard too soon. There’s a reason 3D movies are still popular in theaters; people genuinely enjoy them and are willing to pay at least some premium for them.
Frankly, I’d much rather have a 3D TV than a “smart” TV.
The fact that the AVP gives you fully isolated video streams for each eye is what makes it kickass compared to any glasses-filtering based display. It's perfect stereo.
What sets it apart from things like Meta Quest is Apple's best-in-class video rental / stream / purchase infrastructure all going back to the original iTunes.
And then you have apps like Disney Plus that fully support it.
Same reaction. The vision pro is clearly a great headset. The biggest thing restraining it has been the ability to program for it. If Apple will not let 3rd party devs access the primitives needed to create game engine support then Apple needs to lend that support. Here they are
The biggest thing restraining it is the ergonomics and form factor. No one wants face PCs. Imagine how women, who are half the population, and who spend 0.5T dollars a year on hair and makeup products, are going to deal with smashing a 1.5 pound PC into their faces and held in place with straps around their head and hair. SJ would have smothered that thing in the crib the second his team had no answer for how a product that excludes half the population at the get go could possibly be successful. Can you imagine iPhone shipping in a form factor that required women redo their hair and makeup after every single use?
1. That's an anecdote, but you know that. I'm going to guess that the wife of someone on this forum is nerdier than average.
2. Even if you WANT a face PC, that doesn't mean you'll love using it and keep it once the honeymoon wears off. Supposedly over half of VR headset owners use their device less than once per month.
I used to want a headset. I bought a Valve Index. Everything about the device was fantastic. The games were fantastic. But then I sold it about 6 months later because, meh, it's just not something that was practical and usable frequently enough.
So right now we have basically ideal headsets Meta Quest 3/3S which are excellent, dirt cheap, lightweight, and have a large software catalog but they still struggle to retain users and grow the market.
The Vision Pro hasn't even resolved motion sickness for 100% of users. You can love it and still be forced to discontinue use one by something you can't control about your own body.
> So right now we have basically ideal headsets Meta Quest 3/3S
Cmon, it has shitty hardware and shittier software. The only thing going for it is price and a game catalogue they've basically purchased. Which is admittedly a formidable combo, but it's clear nobody wants it. There's no leverage to make them actually cater to the consumer.
I would say cost is the hardest part to swallow—hence why I think it's ludicrous to even vaguely suggest it's aimed at general consumers. But i suppose it's difficult to tease these things apart.
> Battery alone precludes this. Even just streaming video back and forth is going to be too power-hungry for serious use with lightweight glasses.
I know this is obvious, but the battery doesn't have to go in the glasses. When the glasses are just a wireless monitor, it opens up all sorts of possibilities for belttop computers. Obviously, the glasses still need some power, but the battery can be very small, comparatively. Put the weight and heat into something with a mobile phone form factor.
Apple Watch -> $250
iPhone 16 Pro Max -> $1200
iVirt -> $2400
iVirt LTE -> $3200
iGlass -> $600
Now you can charge $3000 for you VR kit, but claim it only costs $2400. Plus people shell out $600 for the glasses even though they don't have the CPU. They just want to look like they do. Or they buy multiple pairs for different locations or as backups or whatever. The profit on the glasses could be huge. Especially if they could replace the Apple Watch for some people.
Googling "belttop" just shows belts. To what are you referring? Are you suggesting wiring the glasses to some battery stored elsewhere? Sure you can do that, but I thought people these days hated wires (in spite of an objectively superior interface to wireless). But you certainly can't power streaming for it (for more than say an hour) with the battery you can actually store in glasses.
I've never even heard of an iVert.
> Plus people shell out $600 for the glasses
I want to sell these people a bridge. Pray tell me where I can find them because their money is absolutely begging to be taken for a pittance. Who the fuck is paying $600 for $5 of plastic?
Edit: i realize i only addressed part of your comment. I think I get that you're trying to convey an iVert as an apple product, right?
> Now you can charge $3000 for you VR kit, but claim it only costs $2400. Plus people shell out $600 for the glasses even though they don't have the CPU. They just want to look like they do. Or they buy multiple pairs for different locations or as backups or whatever. The profit on the glasses could be huge. Especially if they could replace the Apple Watch for some people.
Do we have evidence they aren't subsidizing this? If you can't look at production cost this speculation seems useless. And to claim that $2400 is any more within the realm of affordability is insane. If they actually wanted normal people to bite they'd have priced it at ~$700. This is for rich people and reviewers only.
Oh this is definitely for rich people only. I thought that was a given. Who else spends $1200 on a laptop every two years? Who else spends $300 on a watch? We're looking for people who spend $200-500 on sunglasses--the non-electronic kind.
You ask where to find these people? Visit your closest Apple store. Or a rodeo arena. Or a Tesla charging lot. Or a Whole Foods market. The United States is crawling with these people.
It is a technological tour de force and an amazing demo of what's possible and what is soon to come. But if we define a "good product" to mean a commercially successful one, then it isn't very successful. Still, I'm hoping it won't be killed and that it will continue to evolve and become successful eventually.
> But if we define a "good product" to mean a commercially successful one
Why would we define a "good product" as a "successful product"? These are 2 different things. There are many ways to define a "good product" (is it useful? is it well made? is it innovative?), success is something else. All combinations of good-bad / successful-unsuccessful are possible.
Thats a very naive understanding of success. Youre telling the soap maker on etsy doesnt have a successful product because she doesnt sell a million units a day? Youre telling me that Rolls Royce Aerospace isn't successful because they only 100 aircraft engines a year?
That soap maker didn't spend $10B in R&D figuring out how to make the soap. Your retort makes zero sense. Apple's worst products sold tens of millions of units in their first couple of years while Vision Pro sold about 370K units in year 1 and well into year 2 still has plenty of inventory sitting on warehouse shelves to cover all of 2025 demand. It literally bombed in the market. It's an abject failure of a product that couldn't be called a success in any way beyond a great prototype and some excellent demoware. It's a flop and a joke.
It didn’t bomb in the market. It was priced for supply constraints. They basically tied Meta on all headset revenue in its first year (450k units and $1.4 billion). visionOS is a triumph and foundation for the next decade of computing, and the entire product line of Apple is adapting to its look and feel. The entire XR / VR industry is changing their strategy to respond to visionOS , particularly Meta horizon OS which has incorporated numerous improvements that were directly inspired by Apple. And plenty of Apple products sold a lot less than 10 million annually to this day.
Applying this to apple is beyond comprehension... What do you mean by using such a term? Apple is likely the richest single entity to have every existed, outside of perhaps the US economy as a whole. This single vr product line made apple more money than either of us will make in a lifetime. So hopefully i'm mistaken and you can educate me as to what the word means.
But hopefully you meant "objective". Which is still stupid, but is at least a familiar and manageable form of stupidity.
I assume the GP means "successful in the market" by "successful product". They're distinguishing between something that might be successful otherwise and something that is successful as a product.
>* It's clearly far more impressive technologically than any competitor.
Technology hardly makes a product.
>The price point clearly indicates it wasn't aimed at the general consumer,
You don't put your CEO on the cover of Vanity Fair and devote half your retail space and staff to it if it's not for the general consumer.
>* They got loads of feedback
Not as much as they hoped. They hoped to have 500K units in the wild in the first year and ramp up for the second year to a meaningful production run but that never happened because demand fell off a cliff once the fanboys got theirs and so the feedback is very, very limited and mostly negative or untrustworthy.
>* Nobody who is this critical seems to articulate what success would have looked like.
Apple scale scales. Meet or break Watch's first 2 year sales maybe? Watch, derided as a failure in the first year actually sold about ~20M units across both year 1 and year 2. Vision Pro will sell fewer than 500K units across year 1 and 2. 500K units!! One doesn't need to define success when failure is so easily defined here.
>Even just streaming video back and forth is going to be too power-hungry for serious use with lightweight glasses.
Spectacles will be entirely different technology stacks. See the Meta Orion prototype for example. You are correct, battery is an issue. Even bigger though is heat. Can't let things get smartphone hot on your face or it's game over. Anyway, expect low-res, narrow field of view, 2D overlays, more like your car's HUD than the immersive experience of goggles. But at least spectacles have a chance where goggles clearly do not, as demonstrated at both the high end and low end by Apple and Meta.
They had about 450 K units in the wild in the first year. They will sell around 600 K units of the first version until the second one is released later this year. This was on a potential production target of 900 K units. So it’s not exactly a failure so much as an underperform due to them over pricing it for supply constraints.
VisionOS is clearly a triumph and the basis of UX for their entire product line. The scepticism is gonna age like those who were sceptical about the original Mac and Windows. Vision Pro isn’t even all that expensive by historical standards.
I believe there's going to be a lot more investment if no other reason than Tim Cook seems to care deeply about it (and beating Zuckerberg).
Strategically it make sense. The only real threat to the iPhone which Apple makes all their money from, is a new form factor that replaces phones. Maybe glasses/goggles will never replace phones, but spending billions a year to make sure that you win the glasses market just in case they do is very cheap insurance.
>> "Tim cares about nothing else," an insider with knowledge of the matter told Gurman. "It’s the only thing he’s really spending his time on from a product development standpoint."
>> he's looking to beat Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg — who shares an obsession with AR and VR headsets — to market.
Is Tim Cook a product person now?
Does Apple care about being first now (instead of being best)?
Before the Vision Pro release we heard similar reporting from Gurman (1) (and recall the skepticism about Gurman's reporting: 2)
Yet here we are. After a decade of promoting AR (3) Tim Apple released a headset of which "the weirder things about visionOS (and the Vision Pro itself, really) is that there’s not a lot of true AR in the mix" (4)
Cook took all of the top Vision Pro talent and put them to work on Siri. Those who didn't go are either working on the spectacles (no relationship at all to the tech in the goggles) or they're working to clear out the pipleline of goggles work that's already close to finished that they can deploy along with a new model that uses mostly the same components as the first which lets them make their supply chain whole after they ended production well short of what they promised their component makers. Rather than leave their supply chain high and dry and their developers disappointed with early cancellation, they'll make one more go of it to buy themselves the time to progress on spectacles (again, totally unrelated tech) so Cook can claim that goggles evolved into spectacles rather than admit that goggles bombed and they're retrenching around spectacles and that entirely different tech stack and approach, for which zero of the goggles investment by Apple or 3rd party developers will transfer.
You’re covering this board with statements of rumor, personal opinion and conjecture, as if they were statements of fact and getting the rumours wrong consistently. The Vision Pro leader, Mike Rockwell, runs both visionOS and Siri/AI. Many of his lieutenants are working on Siri, while many are staying on visionOS. The architectural approach and UX of visionOS is infecting the entire software group.
Goggles have not bombed, and are not going away for at least a decade. Apple will not be abandoning visionOS for spectacles, I know you keep repeating this, but it’s false.
The first "cancelled" reporting was Gurman saying that they'd moved on to spectacles which is true, much of the talent was reassigned to other projects including AR spectacles.
The next reports said Vision Pro was over but a Vision "lite" was on the way to give it one more go.
The next reports said the Vision Pro chip and ship minor spec bump plus a lighter cheaper version.
The next reports said Vision, unclear pro or lite, plus tethered goggles (PCVR for Mac, probably like the Beyond 2 but shiny and metal.)
The reports after that said most of the top talent from the Vision Pro teams has moved to Siri to rescue it and AI.
So, we've got most of the talent moved to spectacles and Siri, and a tethered device and an all-in-one device on the table.
Those are mostly likely last ditch attempts at rescuing the massive R&D investment and equally important, a chance to make their supply chain whole after ending production short of what Apple promised them. We'll see the next products integrate nearly all of the components of the first and that'll clear the decks for their suppliers so they're not left high and dry as well as letting their devs get one more crack at things and ship the VisionOS 3.0 stuff they've been hard at work on this last year.
Making your devs and supply chain happy is hardly a drop in the bucket cost wise compared to the investment already made so that's what they're doing.
They'll try a cheaper version of the immersive all-in-ones and a PCVR version that strips out the PC they've spent 10 years and $10B integrating to see if a display peripheral for $2K will beat an all-in-one face PC at $4K (but that won't give Cook the new platform he was hoping to own and monetize, just another accessory for SJ's creations.)
The core idea is solid. At this point it just needs to be lighter, have better battery, and a much lower price. With further refinement and increased economies of scale these issues could potentially be fixed.
Nearly all of the reviews I’ve read say that it’s a good user experience overall, but it’s not worth the price.
It doesn't need a battery at all. Just have it connect directly to a Mac to use as a virtual Mac display. It's what I use my Vision Pro for as its primary use case, to have an ultra-wide monitor in front of me without taking up any physical space. I use it for hours every day as my primary programming platform.
I really have no other use case, and don't need the VR/AR features. The virtual ultra-wide display of the latest VisonOS updates, which has the area of 2 4k monitors, is just amazing for coding. It's an incredible user experience and worth every penny for the Vision Pro for that alone.
Throwing away some of the AR/VR features and using it as a virtual display only would make it lighter and smaller. I could use something that doesn't block me from taking a drink while I code, for example. I couldn't care less about video games as well.
Apple (and Meta) didn't want a great PC accessory, they wanted new platforms they could own and monetize. They spent 10 years, both of them, integrating the whole PC inside the goggles because the display only approach had little value to them. Apple may try a PCVR headset, probably similar to the Beyond 2 but with glass and aluminum instead of plastic, as "big Mac display" is the only value any decent number of Vision Pro users get from their devices and Apple's got plenty of unused component supply and supply chain lined up already, but goggles are likely a dead form factor.
Man, I don't even bother using the ultra-wide monitor on my desk. The screen on my laptop can already display orders of magnitude far more information than I can easily process at one time. Even with contexts where I'm comfortable managing windows/buffers manually (e.g. emacs) there's simply too much space to easily manage. What do you do with all that space? Is it just pulling up every possible resources at once so you don't need to bother doing anything more than moving your eyes to switch contexts? How often are you switching contexts?
I find the extra space useful over just a laptop screen for coding - I can have a simulator to one side, and a coding window open with a good amount of space for metadata sidebars, along with a window or two for code documentation.
Where it really shines though is for photo review and editing. There it is spectacular to have so much space for image review even with a good number of adjustment controls up.
The other thing the screen is great is for use on a plane. No-one can see what you are working on, but it's also a kindness to others since your laptop screen is totally dark. It was really nice working on an international flight with the AVP and a laptop.
I appreciate the insight. I definitely understand why you might prefer this, especially with the in flight example and the photo editing. The one example I came up with internally was video editing/viewing, which seems to align quite well.
And yet I have people constantly telling me how they have four monitors set ups and still not enough screen real estate… and this is why they don’t like the Vision Pro, which can only give you one big ultra wide max.
I've yet to meet someone with strong preference for screen real estate that could back it up with productivity. Sometimes people just want stimulation.
Edit: i have no gripe with these people, I just simply don't buy that they're more productive. We all need our comforts. Mine is music.
There's nothing really to "throw away" that would make it slighter and smaller whilst still keeping your desired feature set.
The reality is that you're using the VR/AR features in one specific way - not that you're not using VR/AR
It's possible a slightly weaker CPU or GPU could be used but I don't think so and in any case the effects of that would be on cost not on weight. And I don't think the difference would be significant.
The external display being the EyeSight thing? I agree there. That's an expensive boondoggle that will probably be missing in the next iteration in any case.
I don't think you can get rid of cameras without reducing the gesture tracking fidelity. That's the reason the Vision Pro has so many cameras.
> M2 CPU subsystem
Not clear on what this means without looking up the spec sheet. Do you mean "use a slower CPU" or something else? If the former - it won't help that much with size or weight.
Sounds like you're really looking for something like the Bigscreen Beyond?
Congratulations, you just reinvented a decade old discontinued Microsoft products, Windows MR and HoloLens, which ended up being subsidization program for SteamVR and a pure tech demo.
Did not know HoloLens had 23megapixel displays to show high resolution text for coding. It must have been really useful back then with such a high resolution display that you could use for coding all day.
People really need to understand that its the details that make a product viable, not the concept.
HoloLens 2 had higher pixel density than AVP at 2K horizontal resolution at 43deg HFOV. So yeah, you just didn't know HoloLens had 23megapixel displays to show high resolution text for coding, nearly a decade ago.
The problem was the same as today. Dead numb market response to non-SteamVR VR/MR/AR/XR headsets.
Sure, but that PPD number is what prevents me from using these headsets as a primary display replacement. I personally don't need a virtual display that fills 100 degrees of my vision and would happily sacrifice FOV for something usable.
This is from someone who has spent hundreds of hours coding in VR, which currently requires big font sizes and screens that take up massive FOV, which I find very uncomfortable for extended periods.
Also two decades of headset display products that have existed the entire time VR has been a thing of pop culture interest, and yet has never been a product the masses give a fuck about.
The masses don't consume everything on their phones because they care about screen size or fidelity. Sure, they will buy phones with bigger and better screens than other phones, but if they want to do something on a big screen they will use their 60 inch 4k TV
In fact, the masses basically don't do computer stuff at all anymore.
No, it's not. The form factor cannot possibly shrink enough in size and weight or gain enough input ergonomics to make the gorgeous outputs worth it. Not gonna happen for goggles, ever. People won't smash a PC into their faces for no use cases beyond what their laptops and smartphones amply provide for. You think women who spend half a trillion dollars a year and an average of an hour a day on their hair and makeup are going to smash any kind of PC, no matter how small and light, into their faces requiring they redo their hair and makeup after every use? Really?
Spatial computing is to interact with and manipulate 3D space—blending the physical and digital worlds. It enables users to understand, interpret, and respond to the geometry, position, and movement of real-world environments.
I fail to see that as a future mode of user/computer interaction that competes with or augments mobile/laptop computer usage in any meaningful way.
Even movie watching, the most successful application of visionOS / Vision Pro, has limited use because it forces a solitary experience. While it can be useful (eg on a plane or in bed while your SO sleeps), you also already carry your phone and earbuds with you so it isn’t a compelling enough use case. Nobody is creating games for vision either and it I think it’s unlikely to become a favored general computing device or mode.
I can probably say more succinctly: spatial computing appears to be a classic case of a solution looking for a problem.
Prior art by Microsoft (HoloLens) and Google (Glass) are interesting because they occupied very different positions on the spatial computing spectrum, but in both cases they surfaced headwinds like the fact that people are unlikely to put glasses or headsets on the face/head juts in order to “compute”.
If there was a path to direct neural input or contact lens delivery, now we might be talking, but even then, you’ve solved the physical impediments but still don’t have a compelling general purpose computing use case.
Some would argue an addictive use case like porn can tip the scales, but I’m doubtful and, besides, I think we can be sure that Apple would never position themselves to depend on porn to advance their business interests.
It seems safe to predict that within 3 — 5 years Apple gives up on this vision. They might come back to it in the future but I think they’re more alarmed by the other computer interaction paradigm that is getting a lot more traction: GenAI/LLM, which subverts the need for a rich visual display and fits and extends all our other computing models more elegantly.
I think you're looking at the command line and saying a mouse is a solution looking for a problem.
Its not just about manipulating objects spatially. You could do that on a desktop screen with a wii-mote. The other aspect of the form factor is that its an always on, omni-present display, with awareness of the user's surroundings.
This unlocks the ability for apps to be locked to specific locations and contexts, to overlay information on the world, and to, as you stated, manipulate them in a spatial way.
Once the UX itself isn't an uncomfortable hassle, the use cases are really very easy to imagine.
I think it's not actually that bad a situation, to me I think we're just at matters of degree. To explain:
It's not that people can't see that it might be super nice to have an experience kind of like the AVP for a few already-known problems:
1. As an alternative to a big, heavy, non-portable display(s) or a bulky laptop for people who can't always just work at a desk.
2. As an alternative to a TV
3. Fun gaming applications. For instance, MarioKart Home Circuit is a neat game that uses physical karts with cameras, which you play on the TV, but imagine how cool it would be if kids could run around the house and the neighborhood with friends in AR racing karts that only you can see.
1 and 2 are already perfectly there, and obviously a very small number of games that take advantage of VR exist, but they're not that ambitious.
The issue though is that nobody wants those 'problems' solved badly enough to (A) pay $3500+ plus tax for it, nor (B) wants to wear a very heavy and awkward-looking helmet with poor battery life.
The promise is there. If a device can be made that is far lighter, can fold to fit in a coat pocket, with better battery life, and costing $1000, that could go a long way to being something people would find well worth the effort of carrying around and worth the cost. If everybody has one and it's comfortable and light, watching movies on it together, either on an awesome AR screen with atmospheric effects, or in a VR movie theater could be a fun experience rather than look like an absurd antisocial nerd thing.
All this will require investment and improvement of the tech, and will require a healthy developer ecosystem, but with those pieces I'd give the idea itself a good shot. We'll see if Apple is willing or able to do either one. If not them, someone else might.
as an avp hobby dev i dont disagree with your prediction. its a product i want and think is good, but im sure most people dont want and think is bad.
i somewhat agree with your solution looking for a problem statement but i think a potential application for spatial computing is data collection and presentation. think of how many businesses depend on filling out forms to report on the state of a physical object/equipment. a spatial component where that form now has a location in space and the scene with the object can be reconstructed for review is valuable for businesses. to clarify, this is a case for spatial computing, not the avp. the avp is nowhere near rugged enough to do the job safely and one day the data collection is best handled by drones
GenAI/LLM slop subverts the need for a rich visual display. WTF. Please explain How does a statistic based lossy compression technique with high error rates does that?
It’s telling that the best use case Facebook could come up with for its AI YouTube commercial spam is “give me conversion starters” lol.
Spatial computing of iPad apps floating in the air with an even worse, low information rate input method?
Neat concept, kneecapped at birth by sandboxing requirements, App Store rules, and Apples desire to own all of the innovation that could happen on the platform.
Siri on visionOS is actually quite refreshing for its speech to text, it is almost entirely on device and very low latency, with much more accuracy than you see on iOS. The combination of a keyboard, trackpad, Siri, hand and eye tracking is incredibly high information rate input for me and it’s what I use for most of the day for the past eight months or so.
I also wished it was more Mac air than iPad but the remote wide curved desktop feature is VERY nice. It seems to me the next logical step is remote individual app display/controls.
Sadly the Adtech scumbags can’t help themselves from trying to steal all the data they can, just see how they ignore robots.Txt, download phone address/numbers lists, download the outlook data file until measures were added to stop that, paying game publishers to include libraries loaded with phone home calls, and ignoring do not track because $$$ > ethics. Heck even Nvidia video drivers phone home with collected metrics.
Sandboxed operating systems based on bsd jails(iOS), flat pack and snaps (Linux), and chromeOS are a first step at stopping this unethical behavior. The good old days of trusting software from large companies not to install data harvesting spyware are long gone.
Not if it was 90% done and you want to clear the decks of nearly completed work before moving on. It's absolutely common to ship stuff to make third party suppliers and partners whole even when you've decided not to continue investing in a product. Keeping partners happy is critical to the smooth functioning supply chain Cook built and which gives Apple most of their success today.
A big feature like this will be at most 20-30% done when you open a PR, because the rest of the work is in collaboration to suit upstream which will as always require notable changes and rewrites.
Spending manweeks to manmonths on new upstream work that won't see any practical use until half to a whole year later, after getting legal to work things out, is a significant investment in new development.
This has nothing to do with suppliers or partners. They are not dumb enough to measure a product roadmap in number of random PRs, but will look at first party software and hardware roadmap.
Sure you can. That said, I'm not sure what Apple's usual style is and it might be pretty out of character (or not) to drop support shortly after an MR.
No you can't. Upstreaming a large feature like this requires at the very least allocating a number of manweeks to the upstreaming process, and that's without accounting for actually writing the feature in the first place. Making a PR and not following up would be worse PR (heh) than doing nothing, which is also costly.
If they had dumped a tarball or a fork somewhere with a hacked up PoC it could have looked like they just dumped what they had, but even that requires approvals and time from legal, and so someone has to decide its worth investing in.
(I have no interest in speculating about the Vision lineup itself, just commentating on open source contributions.)
You really don't understand how much money Apple's sunk on this and how little comparatively it takes to wind down operations in a way that makes partners and suppliers happy. Keeping a couple small teams going, even with entirely new versions shipping, to keep your supply chain whole and your partners coming back for future products is cheap and easy and very likely what Apple's doing now that most of the top talent was moved to spectacles and Siri. Letting your OS and partner software teams clear their pipelines is absolutely common at Apple and elsewhere. Denying that is silly.
They could also throw money out their window, light it on fire, let their employees do whatever they want instead of regular Apple work, etc.
A lot of managers (and legal) have to approve and allocate significant budget to bad ideas. Companies generally try to avoid doing bad ideas that are a net negative.
This is precisely what they're doing, shipping everything that was mostly already cooked, clearing out the pipleline for their own developers and for third parties, particularly the supply chain they left high and dry when they ended Vision Pro production early, but also their own OS devs and the ones working with third party software and content sponsorships.
They've already moved all the top talent and the next thing looks like a PCVR device that guts the PC from Vision Pro and maybe a chip and ship bump or even a cheaper model with sub-premium materials and lower fidelity optical stack.
What ever is going on, it's clearly not the priority it was and most people paying close attention see a steep decline in the viability of goggles at Apple. That form factor was a flop, as the ergonomics simply didn't align with the use cases for most normal people.
Unfortunately the price tag is too high for me, and since I'm based in the Netherlands, I did not manage to schedule a demo. However, what makes a good product is subjective and you're right that in many ways it is a good product.
From what I can see, the hardware and software quality are high, and the user experience is greatly simplified in contrast to something like Meta Quest, which' UX is often rough and clunky.
My main argument for saying it's not a good product, is that the form factor is not where it should be for mass consumer appeal.
Another subjective and personal pet peeve is that it's not possible to create an AR experience using custom rendering logic with Metal. One has to use RealityKit. Only a fully immersive experience (VR) can be created with Metal. (This might have changed since it came out and I'm happy to be proven wrong, then I'll definitely buy one). I understand the reasoning behind locking this down, but I would love to experiment with writing AR 3D modeling software for visionOS.
Yeah - I thought it was a good product, just a way-too-expensive-to-ever-gain-popular-support, completely useless one since no developer wants to support a new Apple platform knowing how brutally Apple treats developers with their in-app-purchase nonsense, and Apple itself sure isn't doing anything to put any wood behind the arrow.
If Apple cared, they'd drop the money to get, say, immersive courtside experience at every NBA and NFL game for a subscription fee. New long-form immersive content, not these silly 5-10 minute videos they drop every month or two.
It's a great product. But Apple's not serious enough about it. Someone who can deliver at least one of "normal people can buy it" or "a ton of incredibly compelling content exists" will own this market, eventually. It probably won't be Apple.
" just a way-too-expensive-to-ever-gain-popular-support"
You assumed that models would stay that price forever???
"how brutally Apple treats developers with their in-app-purchase nonsense"
How is 15% brutal to have access to a market base of hundreds of millions of customers who can click to purchase without entering a credit card.
"Apple itself sure isn't doing anything to put any wood behind the arrow"
Of all the dumb things you said, this may possibly be the dumbest - though to be sure the other two items are incredibly stupid.
Apple has put a TON of effort into the Vision Pro. They have continued to produce high quality immersive content. They have obviously continued to work on new versions. They have recently put on an entire developer day program on producing immersive content (programmatic and video related). They have greatly improved the Mac mirroring features and added other good UI updates on a pretty continuous basis since launch.
Apple is doing all they can to move the platform forward, it just takes time to reduce costs. It's a platform well worth looking into supporting since Apple is obviously fully committed to it moving forward.
> You assumed that models would stay that price forever??
Apple didn't bother to try to keep the cost down on this version, and for Apple, cost plus the margins they demand dictated the high price.
> "How is 15% brutal to have access"
Okay, first of all, 30%. We're not talking indie devs with <1MM in revenue that can get the 15% deal for a little while. The kind of developers they need to make huge killer apps are ones like Epic, Blizzard, etc. And entertainment firms like Netflix, the ones Apple insists on soaking for 30% of revenue across the board, and those firms have voted with their feet and aren't embracing any Apple platforms. I don't care, I'm not and will never develop for Apple's various "stores" -- take your argument up with the developers who hate them. Nobody wants to give Apple another market to throw their considerable weight around in.
> "They have continued to produce high quality immersive content. They have obviously continued to work on new versions. They have recently put on an entire developer day program on producing immersive content (programmatic and video related)."
Big deal. There isn't enough content that even many big Apple fans who love the product in theory mostly don't use them and admit they were a poor investment. A couple silly 10 minute shorts a month isn't enough to justify it. If they cared, they'd put serious money - of which they have plenty - behind selling a device (any device!) at a compelling price even at a subpar margin. See gaming consoles. Or they'd do what it takes to get developers and content companies to produce content. That means sucking it up and offering better terms than they have on other platforms (or doing sweetheart deals, say, Amazon can sell on the Kindle iOS app with a 5% commission in exchange for promising to produce a ton of immersive content on AVP.) Whatever it takes.
They're not serious (at the top level -- i am sure the person just in charge of AVP is serious, but Tim's not on board enough to support them).
Their priority is not selling a mass market low margin product. That is Meta‘s strategy, and they’ve lost nearly $100b because they think it’s the future of all computing. The thing is, Apple agrees. But they’re not the kind of company to burn that kind of capital.
Vision Pro was all about selling an enthusiast device that pushes the boundaries of XR technology into what they thought was appropriate baseline that would shift the market. They succeeded at that, the entire market is changing their strategy to respond to visionOS. visionOS has set the baseline for spatial computing so much that even horizon OS is copying it now. Apple takes the product line very seriously, they they’re just playing a different game than you want them to play.
I mean, I don't care what they do (other than as a shareholder, lol. But it's not a major part of my portfolio.)
I just do not think they have made an impact on the mass-market -- and at their market cap, anything short of mass-market should be considered a failure and a distraction from products that actually sell.
"Horizon OS copying them" is flattering I guess, but they're not copying all the stupid things about AVP: The heavy, expensive metal construction, the silly outer display, the stupid tethered proprietary battery, the $3500 price tag. I do have a Quest 3 though, which is vaguely fun, but was an impulse buy I only occasionally use.
I've never even tried the AVP, and while that seems like a disqualification of me as a judge of it, that's just the point: I'm a geek. If even I dismiss it as a useless and overpriced toy, it will never be mass market, because normal people need more of a justification than I do to adopt a gadget. It needs to do something amazing that people immediately see the value of. Which is why I cited courtside NBA games (not a 10-minute short btw) as an example.
If Apple's 'game' is to make a niche device with no important apps and about 5,000 MAUs then they're playing it great.
Good means fit for purpose and a product your CEO pitched from the cover of Vanity Fair magazine and devoted half of his massive store real estate and staff to making successful that sells only about 350K units in the first year and projected to sell only about 150K units in its second year because even the huge number of in-store demos couldn't convince people to put PCs on their faces, is clearly not fit for purpose. If it was truly the future of PCs today as Tim Cook told us, it would not have flopped but the form factor and resulting ergonomics make it useful for little more than novelty experiences for a few nerds with more cash than most.
There are many definitions of “good.” But at the most fundamental, it is an amazing VR device. It excels for watching movies — the video quality is simply stunning. The immersive experiences from Apple are also jaw-dropping. So in terms of what the device IS, it’s a good product.
Is that good enough to break into mass appeal? Evidence says No
I had the HTC Vive quite a few years ago, using it a lot and constantly buying new games and experiences to try it out. It was a little annoying paying full whack for little 5-10min tech demos but was still encapsulated by it. Eventually got the wireless extension to avoid having to detangle the rope of a cable you were tethered to, but the base stations in the corner of the room were still annoying me cause you constantly had to re-calibrate it everytime someone nudged or moved them.
Left it for quite a few years and after seeing the reviews about the Quest 3, I bought that and was amazed by how simple it was to pickup and use and the fact that you didn't need a monster computer running it. You literally pick it up and get going. The Meta app store is filled with lots of VR Titles which aren't just tech demos and you can STILL hook it up to your computer and play a host of Steam games. The Quest 3 was like €500 and basically a full platform.
The Vision Pro got announced with a few improvements like higher resolution but it was an insane €3500... ok I was curious how much better it would be, since I was quite impressed by my Quest 3.
My friend had bought one, one of those people who loves to wear expensive watches and be seen in public having a lot of money. As with a lot of Apple products it's sometimes about being seen to have the latest thing and the Vision Pro was great for sitting in public, catching attention and showing people that you can afford a €3500 device.
He brings it on holiday and is passing it around the room, showing people the dinosaur tech demo and everyone is amazed at how brilliant it is. For all of those in amazement (including my friend) it was their very first experience getting into VR and I also went through the same feeling when I first got the HTC Vive.
He gives it to me and shows me the dinosaur tech demo and all I could really think was... how does this thing cost €3000 more than the Quest 3? I asked him: Where are the games? there are none. Can you hook it up to Steam? No... When the battery dies, can you swap it with another? No.
Unless I had bought my Quest 3 to compare them side-by-side I honestly could not feel that it was much better visually... the finger tracking to go through menus wasn't bad, but that was it.
I think the fact that Apple devices are generally in the thousands already: MBP can be like £3000, iPhone can be like £1k... it makes sense that they were able to sell them for the price of what they did, but for me it's just insanity.
Do they have a library of games yet? Do they have any VR Games yet? Someone said it wasn't priced for consumers and I guess that's fine, but again... why wouldn't you just buy a Quest 3 (unless you hate Facebook)?
you can't really use them for long durations of time because your face gets hot and sweaty, from my experience. It doesn't feel good to have something stuck to your face.
Also, the resolution still isn't good enough to see small text IMO.
>progress in display technology will enable Apple to build a more attractive consumer product, in the form of light, comfortable and unobtrusive AR glasses.
Except the Vision Pro displays have zero to do with the technology they'll use in spectacles. Spectacles are an entirely different tech stack. See the Orion demo for an example and you'll see that 100% of the R&D spent on goggles is tossed on the bonfire when considering spectacles.
I was so excited about the Vision and desperate to get one.
Finally my company has bought one for testing and I’m honestly not sure what to even use it for.
Maybe a big screen Mac? Is that it?
I think Apple has fallen into the same dead end they did with Apple TV: no controller = no games.
Both Apple TV and Vision Pro could have been filled with games from indie devs. But it’s impossible to play most games with a pinch or the worst TV control ever created.
I wonder how much of it can be blamed on the Vision Pro being nothing more than a big wobbly iPod Touch, instead of a real computer.
For me, a Vision Pro would have been fantastically useful if it was a little bit more like MacOS (or Android), and shipped with a native, real terminal that I could run things on. $3500 is suddenly a lot easier to swallow if I could think about it like 20 monitors to run terminals on.
The better analogy is that it's the Apple TV interface for your face. All the buttons are ginormous, the options are barebones, the information density is crap.
> I was so excited about the Vision and desperate to get one. Finally my company has bought one for testing and I’m honestly not sure what to even use it for.
I'm not really sure why anyone would want to use an Apple TV for games, instead of a dedicated console. AFAICT the killer app for Apple TV is airplay. I haven't seen a co-working space conference room TV without an Apple TV attached for years.
I mean, I guess privacy is the other feature. I use an AppleTV at home to bypass all the smart TV nonsense. I know Apple can't be trusted, but I trust it more than a TV manufacturer who tries to shove ads down my throat the moment I connect their TV to the internet.
I refuse to use anything Apple so can't speak for the Apple TV, but I see it as pretty comparable to the Google TV (aka Chromecast w/ Google TV) products, just more open, flexible, compatible, and affordable.
I use Google TV for games on occasion. It has excellent controller support and works great for lightweight games that run fine on the stick. For anything heavier, the Steam Link app is the go-to. I can run the games on my bigass Linux PC and stream them to the TV. I routinely do this for Hogwart's Legacy for example.
Now that said, lately I've been just hooking up my Steam Deck to the TV and using that. Less friction and less bugs by avoiding the Steam Link app. And the Steam Deck is pretty close to a console (certainly much closer than it is to an Apple/Google TV), so perhaps I've just proven your point :-D
> Bundling a controller would increase the cost for everyone to satisfy a minority of gamers.
Apple doesn't have to increase the cost. The leaked BOM suggests that Apple makes a sizable margin on Vision Pro, even if each controller cost $500 they could give them away in-box and still make more money per-unit than the Quest headset. It's not about cost.
> So instead they support all PS5, Xbox, BT etc controllers.
Those are not 6DOF controllers, they are class-compliant USB devices that every single computer really ought to support. If Apple supported OpenXR then they would likely also have the software to support other controllers, but apparently that's a touchy subject in this thread.
Apple probably "makes money" on each unit, but I would imagine the development costs of the Vision Pro were astronomical. With that in mind they might not even be recuperating the costs with their sizable margin.
It’s nice to see this addition. I’m not sure if Godot would be better off bridging OpenXR to apple’s ar compositer or do as these PRs implement.
It isn’t much work to bridge from a metal renderer to the ar compositor. There are nice, if under documented c apis for Compositor Services in visionOS. I don’t think this will end up being a heavy maintenance burden, but they should donate some headsets as the second vertex amplification doesn’t run in the simulator. The max threads per thread group also differ. So real hardware is needed to measure performance.
profiting 180 billion USD per year should put them in a position to also provide grants for hiring workforce for the necessary amount of years that will take to popularize their current and new AR/VR technology (if it'll ever be popular)
even if Godot starts also being the backend for non-gaming applications (which i don't know how the discussion about this went/is going), which AVP could also benefit, i doubt the investement of time to maintain this PR will pay itself, i.e. the few developers releasing software for Apple VR will make enough money and will donate enough for covering maintainer(s) to keep up with a (so far niche) new OS in Godot!
“We already established above that the next paradigm is wearables. Wearables today, however, are very much in the pre-iPhone era. On one hand you have standalone platforms like Oculus, with its own operating system, app store, etc.; the best analogy is a video game console, which is technically a computer, but is not commonly thought of as such given its singular purpose. On the other hand, you have devices like smart watches, AirPods, and smart glasses, which are extensions of the phone; the analogy here is the iPod, which provided great functionality but was not a general computing device.
Now Apple might dispute this characterization in terms of the Vision Pro specifically, which not only has a PC-class M2 chip, along with its own visionOS operating system and apps, but can also run iPad apps. In truth, though, this makes the Vision Pro akin to Microsoft Mobile: yes, it is a capable device, but it is stuck in the wrong paradigm, i.e. the previous one that Apple dominated. Or, to put it another way, I don’t view “apps” as the bridge between mobile and wearables; apps are just the way we access the Internet on mobile, and the Internet was the old bridge, not the new one.”
There's more to development than just code. I'm sure the Godot developers value the contribution and will try to make the most of it, but they got zero input into how to implement it and this PR contains a lot of issues (e.g. it does some API breaking changes that can't just be done as-is.) On top of that, they have no idea (from the outset, I mean: obviously they are communicating now) if Apple intends to continue maintaining this code in the long run or if they just want to put the minimum amount of effort into shipping it and then consider that box checked, shifting the maintenance burden to volunteers. I don't think there needs to be intentional malice, even very nice gestures can work out poorly; we almost lost the Linux NTFS3 driver because Paragon initially stopped maintaining it and nobody else stepped up.
I think Apple can do good here but they should definitely communicate better. For open source, early and often is a good idea. (Though also good to follow through... I have been guilty of many licked cookies purely by accident and poor focus.)
There are many things that would be in Apple's interest to do, but they aren't so that's a complete non-argument.
I think it's a very valid question to ask, as many open source projects I've seen in the past that had to interface with Apple on the developer tooling front had to go through constant pain, as Apple isn't willing to e.g. provide references for certain .plist files, forcing many project to try and reverse-engineer what they do. More precisely there are usually people inside Apple willing to do that, but incapable to do that due to internal structures that result in a lack of clearly defined ownership.
So given that, I would say that if/once the original contributor of this PR moves on(/is made to move on) from that project, there is a good chance that this would also mark the end of cooperation from Apple's side.
The people making the latter comments are ignoring the contents of this PR however, and showing a lack of understanding of the engine itself in the process.
You cannot build this as an extension. It’s a different OS and Godot needs it to be done this way, as many people in the PR have commented as well. An extension would not cover it, and people suggesting that are probably used to the PC VR development model where VR is an extension of an existing supported platform, not a platform in and off itself.
Beyond that, even if Apple supported OpenXR, you’d still need this PR first because it’s covering build support first. It doesn’t cover any of the XR/Spatial rendering elements.
> VR development model where VR is an extension of an existing supported platform, not a platform in and off itself
This is the crux of the issue, both for Apple and for Godot.
In Apple’s case, they’re finding that their vision does not resonate with consumers or developers. So they’re searching for ways to expand chances of success but not entering with an equal partnership mentality. Thats their prerogative but I would argue the arrogance blinds them to reality.
From Godot’s perspective, the question is whether all this distraction is worth it for a platform that has for all intents and purposes failed to prove itself. There’s an opportunity cost and likely constraints that would flow from supporting Apple’s divergent and unproven vision.
In my books it seems clear that it would be a mistake for Godot to invest energy in supporting a niche, heretofore unsuccessful product that is not aligned with Godot’s technical and product roadmap.
I still don’t understand why I see people saying Vision is an unsuccessful and failed platform.
Vision Pro is very clearly an early adopter version of a platform that has yet to truly get started. Obviously, a huge $3500 headset on your head is not the actual intended final form of this platform. The actual intended final form is glasses.
And until those glasses are out you can’t say it failed, because it hasn’t even started yet.
Because the rumor mill loves to churn things up, and people forget the past.
The original iPod was an incredibly niche product. It required a Mac at a time when Macs were way less common than they are now. When Windows support was added, it required FireWire, which was quite uncommon.
The original iPhone did OK but didn't sell super well. It was very expensive, had only 2G connectivity when 3G had already arrived, only worked on the #3 cellular carrier, and didn't support any third-party apps.
The original Apple Watch was bulky and severely underpowered.
Apple continued to iterate on all of these and they ended up being quite successful.
That's not to say Vision Pro will see the same treatment. There are plenty of failed products you can point to as well. Just that an iffy initial release doesn't mean anything about the long-term outlook for the product.
The iPod did have demand, though. It was huge, clunky, somewhat fragile, but people wanted to use one and carry it with them everywhere. Same goes for the iPhone, to some extent. They succeeded as lifestyle products because they were desirable and made life better.
But the Vision Pro? If you sold them at a flat-rate price of $1,000, I don't think I know people that would want to use one regularly. I don't even know anyone who would regularly use one if they got it for free. It's not going to replace the time they spend on their phone or Xbox, and it's probably not going to carve out any new routines so you can watch immersive video. It's competing against your phone and TV for YouTube privileges, and it's going to lose most of the time.
If Vision Pro was desirable to the average person, I might have hope for the product line as a whole. People don't want this from Apple though, it might as well be the spiritual successor to the Pippin.
Anybody I’ve ever demoed this product to has the opposite impression: it would replace their iPad and their TV easily if they could afford it and it was a bit lighter. I play Xbox and PS5 in it all the time ; it isn’t a rival to those products. It’s a preview of the future of all computing.
AFAIK Apple does not allow applications to render traditionally nor gives them access to the camera or other interesting effects.
You are instead given a DOM (really imagine idiosyncratic SVG for 3D) API and you must facade it to your engine object model.
Apple has forced library developers into a situation even worse than Metal: a single, idiosyncratic scene graph like API. None of the performance benefits of using the technology natively. None of the DX benefits of single code, run anywhere, since everything has to be aware of the spatial rendering limitations. It’s like Negative React Native: they had you a weird React that’s non native, and you must wrap it.
Truly, and I have no hesitation here because I will never want to work for Apple and they’re going downhill: this PR has its head so far up its butt.
Maybe this employee should have spent all this time convincing Apple to give developers access to the GPU.
You can render traditionally all you want with metal. You just don’t get some of the features like camera access, or gaze. Which does have its downsides, but is a long way from what you’re describing. I’ve ported a metal based renderer to visionOS for companies already, and you already have engines like Unreal supporting it too.
I’m not even sure what DOM you’re talking about. SwiftUI? RealityKit? The former is for Ui. The latter is an ECS like rendering engine. But neither fit what you describe.
Perhaps before being outraged by things you should be familiar with development on them first.
It's true, I stopped paying attention to the AVP after I returned it.
At the time it was released, which is not that long ago, AVP didn't support what I see is now called "mixed immersion mode." Unity's rendering was built upon the cockamamie scheme Apple had at launch and is the one I was describing in my comment, which is all I was familiar with.
Broadly speaking, you caught me, I don't stay up to date about stuff where everyone knows ahead of time that there is no audience. That's not your fault or my fault, it's Apple's fault.
This is surprising. From everything I've been hearing in the media, I got the impression Apple had mostly given up on their XR products and will keep them on life-support until the technology is ready for mass consumption.
The media loves to spin Apple things as failures right up until the point when they’re a success. See coverage of iPhone, Apple Pay, iPad, etc. Even “Apple faithful” media like MacRumors.com will be measured but pessimistic about Apple’s new efforts because negativity drives clicks more than positivity across the board.
I don't think this is an Apple-exclusive phenomenon. Even if it was, the media would be pretty well-justified in reporting on a lifestyle product with diminished demand. I remember similar news coverage for the PS3, Shamwow, Google Glass, Juicero, Zune, Fire Phone, and so much more.
It feels more like Apple users aren't used to acknowledging Apple's own failures. Because Apple refuses to admit certain products don't succeed (see: iPhone Mini, 12" Macbook, Butterfly Keyboard), their users come to believe that Apple is beyond reproach. If Vision Pro was good enough for the public, it's genuinely hard to imagine how much worse the Apple Car and Airpower could be.
Agree this isn’t Apple exclusive. Mostly what I mean to say is that media tends to portray things as DOOMED if they aren’t amazingly successful right out of the gate. The Vision Pro v1 is not a great product but it’s also a super niche product given the price so expectations of 20M units are far fetched to begin with. It’s more of a Mac Pro tier product than a MacBook Pro 16 or a MacBook Air product, much less an iPad or iPhone type product in terms of addressed market. But I don’t think this means the product is an abject failure that should be cancelled and written off as a sunk cost / dead end.
Apple sold ~17M iPhones in its first 2 years, ~20M Apple Watches in the same timeframe, and ~370K Vision Pros in its first year from a production run of ~500K. No further Vision Pro v1 production is planned, with remaining units allocated for second-year (2025) demand.
Vision Pro is an absolute flop compared to even the "everyone said it would fail the first year" products that went on to success. 500K units across 2 years when the presumed Watch sold 20M in the same timeframe and fanboys are still telling us "you're saying the same thing about AVP as you did iPhone and Watch when they first came out." Maybe so, but Vision Pro is orders of magnitude worse off out of the gate than those other products and Apple's already moved the top AVP talent to Siri, spectacles, and other projects so it's pretty clear Apple agrees it's not going to be a success.
They've mostly given up on the goggles form factor, though the winding down will probably be over the next couple of years. That technology will never be ready so they're moving on to entirely new technologies for far less capable spectacles that will be more like Apple Watch for your eyes, a heads up display much like your car's.
Those who know can't say, and those who say don't know. This isn't universally true, but accurate info from Apple is hard to come by, and it gets harder the farther out you're looking. People outside Apple, and most people inside Apple, don't know where things stand with the Vision product line.
As I understand things, proton allows windows games to just work (pun intended) on Linux. No porting, no rebuild - just download and run.
Who is going to bother doing all the extra work to port their game for Mac?! Time and time again there have been loads of articles on here over the years with developers saying it is simply not worth the hassle to support Linux and Mac.
The downside of relying on translation layers rather than porting from the perspective of Apple is likely that they vey much detest the lack of control that would result from that. Game devs targeting Linux have started viewing Proton/Windows runtime as a target, which has lead to native Linux ports becoming less common. As a person wanting to play the odd game on Linux, this has been a godsend, but for Apple, this would be viewed as an existential threat.
Personally, I'd wish for more extensive Vulkan support, but I have been informed that this is likely not as easily done considering Apples GPUs with TBDR differ somewhat from the industry standard.
At the end though, if Apple truly wanted, they could simply spent money on studios and incentives ports. None-Mobile-Gaming remains no priority for them, simple as that. I haven't seen any indication that the AVP has changed that in any way and I wouldn't be surprised if they view GoDot not as a game engine, but rather another way to create experiences.
The same folks that bother for iOS and iPad games, Nintendo Switch and PlayStation.
Most studios aren't religious about APIs like FOSS developers, they create API agnostic engines with plugabble backends and move on with what is relevant for their game IP.
It has been like this since the dawn of computer games being fully written in Assembly across 8 bit snowflakes.
And for additional context, when it comes to Vision Pro, Ubisoft has one game that is designed with it in mind (Rabbids: Legends of the Multiverse) and CAPCOM has none.
That should tell us something about the appetite to support visionOS.
They have not done that, though. With Proton, almost every Windows game on Steam "Just Works" (and many others do with a small amount of configuration.)
As far as I can tell, there is no way for a player to use GPT to run games from their Steam library on Mac.
Yeah I don’t get it either. A drive-by PR without even offering hardware for testing? The entitlement around OSS these days… One of the richest companies in the world, and then ”but open source should benefit everyone, it’s discrimination if you single out trillion dollar corporations”. Dude..
"why this is not an extension" sounds like an awfully naive question. I'm not a Godot expert but I'd bet a very large amount of money that this is not in the realm of a simple extension, as flexible as Godot can be (and a check of the PR seems to confirm this)
With Godot, you can’t make sweeping platform changes—especially adding a new one—as an extension. This is the only path besides Apple forking Godot, which would be unworkable in the long run and obviously undesirable for both parties.
I kind of expected him to be in there, but it was a nice surprise seeing Miguel de Icaza (guy who's the reason unity uses c#) commenting on this addition, with his current work getting swift and godot to play nicely together as well as making xodot for iOS.
Meanwhile, Apple could garner way more sales if they simply put a video input on the Vision. Gamers, 3-D modelers, drone operators, cinematographers, people using computers in cramped spaces (AKA planes) would all be potential buyers.
But nope; Apple's fear of I/O cripples another product.
Looks like Apple might be prioritizing gaming for the next gen Vision devices? Hopefully, as I know many, myself included that passed on the Vision because the gaming support wasn't there. Price was never an issue.
This to me smells of desperation - not so much as "prioritising gaming" and more "prioritising anyone making any kind of content at all please please please someone make something for our device".
It no more smells of desperation than when Apple contributed modern ScreenCaptureKit support to OBS Studio. They want great experiences for their own platforms and sometimes that means reaching out to other projects.
It's true that the Vision Pro hasn't seen the uptake that Apple's other platforms did at launch, like the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, etc. — but it's nearsighted to think that Apple can't play a long game. It has the patience (and money) to play it all the way to the eventual release of their glasses; by that time, the platform will already have plenty of fantastic software ported from iOS and, eventually, other platforms through ventures like this.
I think there is "playing the long game" and there is "flogging a dead horse".
I still can't believe that both apple and meta bet the farm on VR and screwed up so spectacularly. It was fairly clear that VR was never going to be mainstream for the same reasons that 3D movies and TVs vanished after all that fanfare and marketing a few years ago: people don't want to wear the glasses, and they don't want to pay extra either. We've been there and tried this - people are happy with 2D screens and don't see any real benefits of 3D glasses/headsets worth paying for (...apart from the nerdfactor).
Sure there might be some sort of market for "smart glasses" and people are continually releasing various iterations of those (and I'd be up for a pair too FWIW), but if the vision pro is any indication of what the tech is capable of today, we're a very very long way away from normal-glasses-style form factor units (i.e. size, weight, battery life, discreetness, price, nausea etc).
Tl;Dr - nice try doing something new, but if I were an apple investor I'd prefer they went back to what they knew and not waste further billions upon billions "playing the long game" on a dead-end because they can't accept they made a mistake.
500$ is a toy most upper middle class families can afford. That's the Meta Quest 3.
3500$ will even have someone making 200k plus pause to think if they really need it.
Not to mention the Vision Pro looks much more fragile. Looks like it'll slip off my face and shatter.
I'm cool with wasting $500, but I could do a lot of things of $3,500.That's a round trip flight to Thailand and a nice hotel room, you might be able to fit in a trip to Paris too.
I think we’ve forgotten over the years just how expensive tech can be. The original iMac was 1299 at launch, inflation adjusted that’s $2500 today, for what even at the time was considered a cut down machine. The iBook would launch the next year for $1599, or about $3k today. Is the AVP at least as interesting of a product to buyers as the original iMac or iBook was in 1998? Bear in mind 1998 Apple was just barely holding on after years of mismanagement, still was running Mac OS 8 and neither the iPod juggernaut nor OSX were anywhere on the horizon for people to suspect that Apple would even still be in business or supporting their proprietary computers in a few years.
Perhaps more apt, the original Macintosh released at $2495, or a whopping $7,500 inflation adjusted. Now I’m not thinking that the AVP is necessarily going to change the computing world the way the Macintosh did, but surely its novelty and potential fits somewhere between an iMac and an original Macintosh right?
So instead of building for a platform that has a low barrier of entry and millions upon millions of users, developers should spend time in Apple’s expense plantation.
All in the hopes of sharecropping on the Vision Store.
Honestly I want an open source headset I can run my own code on , that’s what I’m waiting for
The only way to officially distribute apps for iOS devices is via the App Store, giving 30% off top to Apple. If that's not sharecropping I don't know what is
You’re not looking very hard then because there are loads of new games released both with VR support and also exclusively for devices like the Oculus Quest.
What we’ve seen less of is AAA games bolt on VR support as an afterthought - and the reason for that is because it’s almost always a terrible way to play a game that was originally designed to be played with a keyboard and mouse, or traditional game controller.
My fear is that they won't treat godot first class and release updates for unity first.
That kind of first class support would be required for me to switch from unity.
The interesting thing here is that Apple finally learned that games matter. Of course they go about it in the same "we're never wrong" attitude by never admitting it, like how their mice don't have two physical buttons to stay true to "a mouse should have one button" from the original Mac. They're learning though, it was voluntary unlike USB-C on their phones/tablets.
I think that when Apple pivoted to "Apple Silicon" or basically the M series chips they realized that they should pivot to video games also. Once iOS supported an App Store it came out of the gates organically with people making video games for the platform . Unfortunately they never really followed through with helping game developers or any meaningful QC regarding monetization so you have a lot of good games and a whole lot of bad games. Also, Warframe when they made a switch port they figured out they could make an iOS port which really caught on in Japan.
There are exactly zero people in the video game industry working on speculative AVP games. The ones who are thinking about it are not hesitating due to Godot support.
That's the situation now. It will be different when Godot is supported and the Apple Vision Air is released. Then anyone making VR games/apps will have a new target using standard (though less popular than Unity/UE5) development tooling. It will self-select those who find this reasonable.
There are 1/10th-1/100th as many Godot developers as Unity and Unreal developers. If there are no games now, there won't be with Godot support. That said I want Godot AVP support to succeed, but there are other problems all in Apple's court.
There is nothing going on here but embracing. When Microsoft did it, they forked a project and added their own features to their private fork, intending to replace the original. Apple is directly contributing code to the source project here.
Even if Apple was somehow harming and attempting to subsume Godot in this situation, what would the end game be? What would managing a game engine descended from Godot do for them?
Shiny. Unsolicited advice. visionOS is a distraction for the Godot team (whether or not you believe visionOS is a dead end or not). I would recommend focusing on high impact domains while Godot competitors like Unreal and Unity diffuse their attention.
If you officially support visionOS, it now requires all product and engineering innovation to take it into account, slowing down velocity for very little gain, if any.
It looks like Apple put their own people on this one.
If they want to maintain this, the Godot foundation needs to be extremely clear about that. You're talking about an extremely niche platform that will require tons of ongoing maintenance.
I would have hoped Apple also spent time working on the general engine and maybe tackling some bugs. Maybe they did maybe they didn't.
Apple TV for games is super niche, with very little market share in the big scheme of things.
Even when it comes to TV, Apple realized they had to create an Apple TV+ app for other platforms to extend the reach of their investment in shows/movies beyond their own hardware.
I think these connected to TV devices are a wasted opportunity for gaming. They are great for family type video games and with some marketing from apple or Google they could sell tons of games.
I happily paid for Beach Buggy, a Mario Kart type game, my kids are loving it and I think that the company makes a lot of money from this game alone.
But the support from Google is abysmal. No search functionality, developer hostility when trying to publish something etc.
There are however some games which thrive on apple tv. The virtual cycling game zwift is probably one of the most important apple tv games, it's the recommended system to get the game running on the cheap.
So, if you're making an app that benefits from a big screen and your customers are willing to buy a cheap dedicated device to easily use your app on a big screen, supporting apple tv might be a very sensible choice.
> if you're making an app that benefits from a big screen and your customers are willing to buy a cheap dedicated device to easily use your app on a big screen, supporting apple tv might be a very sensible choice.
Compared to other HDMI-connected devices (e.g. Google Streamer fka ChromeCast, Amazon FireTV, Roku) or major TV platforms like Android TV or Samsung and LG, the market share that Apple TV commands is dwarfed. Apple TV devices are also very expensive.
A startup like Zwift that bets on Apple TV as a key GTM strategy is making an error in judgment. Apple TV is extreme long tail footprint.
AppleTV is much more similar to a game console than the mentioned devices. It has a small set of powerful CPU/GPU/memory combos vs the menagerie of disparate and mostly much lower power hardware under the broad tent of “Google related tv platform” stuff.
Meh, I'd say it's a cheap addition when you already have to support iOS and iPadOS devices. Also market share is secondary if people are willing to buy it as a dedicated device and it is cheap (130$) when talking about people's expenditures for this hobby.
But yeah, I'm not an Insider and I'd love to know why they're supporting the apple tv but don't offer the Android App on the Google tv platform. Maybe something about non universal remote inputs or the wildly varying hw capabilities leading to support nightmares (but that's always an issue on Android).
> cheap addition when you already have to support iOS and iPadOS devices.
Presentation form factor and input modality is different on LRUD compared to touch, 10’ vs handheld.
There’s an opportunity cost: it is better to improve the user experience on the vast majority of TV devices (eg Samsung or Android TV or Fire tv) than it is to support a tiny market share device like Apple TV that you now also need to keep up to date.
If they could just let Geforce Now (NVIDIA Cloud gaming platform) ship a native app I would use my Apple TV much more. But no, they prefer to be extremely hostile to users over some app store bs.
Niche platform from one of the biggest companies on the planet isn’t as niche as others though. If there’s a way to get first party support from the vendor directly it could be beneficial to the other platforms too (iOS).
> it could be beneficial to the other platforms too (iOS).
In what way?
As far as I know, iOS support on Godot is almost entirely community-driven. If true, Godot has nothing to gain. Apple is struggling with adoption so they have most to gain from Godot support for visionOS, but is not obvious that visionOS support would benefit Godot in any strategic manner.
One strategic heuristic is that you don’t want to undertake the work to enable another company’s success on a product line, unless you depend on it or believe you have a strategic advantage against other competitors.
For example, if Godot negotiates for exclusivity or primary status for game engine positioning on visionOS and they believe VR is a material future footprint, that might be interesting. Anything less is in Apple’s favor and not in Godot’s.
> Apple; and they're eager to contribute back to it too.
To think Apple is interested in the success of Godot would be a mistake. It might feel like a compliment, but it would be a trap because Apple’s interest stems from increasing the chances of visionOS success and will be happy to externalize the ongoing maintenance tax to Godot.
Unless Godot feels they need visionOS then it isn’t in their interest to entertain Apple’s PR. If anything they should respond saying they already support standard interface in the form of OpenXR.
Did you get burned by a company contributing to an open source project before or what makes you so cynical about this PR? I feel like it's the ideal scenario that a company actually dedicates engineers and time to contribute to an open source project instead of doing their own thing, maybe even behind closed doors.
Have you contributed to Godot yourself or made something of note with it? Multiple developers are actively asking for visionOS support as people on the Godot team have mentioned. Why should your distaste for a platform preclude them from having platform support that would benefit the things they want to build?
Beyond that, have you even looked at the PR here to see what your supposed distraction would be? Most of the PR is shared infrastructure between the Apple embedded platforms.
> Why should your distaste for a platform preclude them from having platform support that would benefit the things they want to build?
They answered this in their initial comment:
> If you officially support visionOS, it now requires all product and engineering innovation to take it into account, slowing down velocity for very little gain, if any.
That’s not really an answer though, anymore than any other platform. I’m not asking why they don’t want it supported, I’m asking why their distaste should overrule everyone else who does.
Just because this one very angry person doesn’t want this platform supported, doesn’t mean others don’t. You could argue the exact same thing in reverse for any other platform that is niche for someone else.
Either monetarily, or with personnel. What I would have really liked to see is for them to not only fix issues relating to their own products, but to help Godot as a whole. Maybe, even add Swift as a scripting option without a hard requirement of owning a Mac.
This looks like a one time "gift" of high maintenance code. It's not like when Microsoft assisted with C# support. I don't need to buy a Windows PC or a $3500 Microsoft headset to make use of that.
It's also really rude to just open a giant PR without a discussion first.
I'll leave this decision to the Godot maintainers but as an outside that only read the PR and comments it seems plausible that it's also in Apples favor to fix issues in the shared iOS / visionOS codebase that they are using, especially if they might come from Apple APIs that could be improved on their side too.
I don't know the Godot ppl, but I hang out on the LibGDX discord and what they want is to make a good engine for its own sake. If someone would be better served with Unity or Godot or anything else they're extremely quick to say so.
The point is to make the world better not for their own project to Win.
I'm assuming Godot is the same way, and the idea of spending effort making sure every other OSS engine doesn't have VisionOS support is a lil baffling
That's one of the things they are discussing in the comment chain. Apple hasn't directly addressed it yet. Seems like if they want this to be official, they ought to donate some headsets and money to offset the increased maintenance...
Apple has more to gain than does Godot. Money and headsets cannot faithfully account for additional complexity and coordination tax. Nevermind potential constraints on other platform expressions of the game engine.
What you want to do is first decide whether it is strategically valuable to be on this platform. If it is important, then you want to make sure there’s ROI in approach. Doing things in reverse, I.e. seeing whether there’s a cost-effective path to support another platform before deciding whether to support is is misguided in my opinion.
The PR to add the basic infrastructure for engine-level support was posted yesterday. There hasn't been enough time for anything to pass through App Store review yet, let alone all the work that has to happen before that, like writing and releasing the rest of the engine support for visionOS, and writing an application to use it.
Expecting a demo application as proof of concept would have been reasonable. Expecting a shipping product in the customer-facing app store is entirely different.
Godot is open source. I'm sure, at least internally, Apple has tested these changes on one or more 'demo' apps. Any of which could be released as public demos.
If only had some sort of developer conference coming up in a little over a month. A conference where they release a bunch of demo and example projects. Well it's too bad no such thing exists.
It should probably be a plugin of some sort rather than built in the engine. It's a very small use case scenario and the devices are expensive and rare.
Like the comments said there are also concerns about maintaining it in the long term.
Having made games in Godot, I'm quite excited by the prospect of making the games within vision OS and playing them in a virtual 3D space. But Apple has only shown its vision for it and the future prospects are very uncertain due to the economic climate and affordability.
Godot already supports VR via OpenXR.
OpenXR is the Khronos-maintained industry standard for VR/AR devices—supported by SteamVR, Oculus, Vive, Pico, Windows Mixed Reality, Quest.
Notably absent is visionOS / Vision Pro.
I would insist Apple conforms to the industry standard. More scalable, open.
> The visionOS platform doesn't have OpenGL support, as it's not supported by visionOS.
Hell would freeze over before Apple conformed and contributed to an existing open standard. They even failed to follow the Godot contribution guide for the PR itself.
> Hell would freeze over before Apple conformed and contributed to an existing open standard.
Better get some blankets because Apple has made significant contributions to many open standards - for example, USB-C. And, back in the day, OpenGL.
Its a mistake to think of a large company like apple as if it were a person, with their own goals and ideas. Apple is just too big for that. I mean, they have 164,000 staff. Thats big enough that "small" business units will still have thousands of people. So each area will end up creating its own culture, and have its own way of doing things.
The graphics division - these days - seems very intent on doing their own thing. But that doesn't tell us much about the rest of apple. 164 000 people is a lot of people. That's an awful lot of different opinions about open standards.
> The graphics division - these days - seems very intent on doing their own thing.
Apple is a top-down hierarchy with ruthless business strategy. Not a value judgment; merely a fact to keep in mind when entering a business relationship with Apple.
Mike Rockwell, serves as the Vice President of the Vision Products Group. Rockwell has been instrumental in spearheading the Vision Pro project and the underlying visionOS platform. His leadership has been pivotal in advancing Apple’s spatial computing initiatives.
To think he and his team have not made intentional choices to support/advance or undermine OpenXR would be naïve in my view.
> To think he and his team have not made intentional choices to support/advance or undermine OpenXR would be naïve in my view.
I'm sure their choices are intentional. But thats just one business unit. Apple is a huge company. And different areas have different priorities.
Not relevant. The VisionOS crew have decided to not support OpenXR and Apple has broadly decided not to support Vulkan, which, together with DirectX are the primary VR rendering technologies.
Not relevant to what? I think we’re talking past each other.
I agree with your point - Apple clearly wants Metal & friends to be their own thing. But the comment I was replying to above commented on Apple and standards. It didn’t mention graphics at all. I replied, discussing Apple as a whole.
> The VisionOS crew have decided to not support OpenXR and Apple has broadly decided not to support Vulkan
Because they already have their own graphics API called Metal. Why aren't you asking Microsoft to drop DirectX and start first-party support for Vulkan?
Because DirectX is a success and Metal is not.
If Apple wanted Metal to be a success then they'd need Windows devices to support it, and ideally a console too (like DirectX with Xbox).
There's a lot of bad things you can say about Vulkan's market position relative to DirectX, but it's clearly more successful than Metal. More games and work applications are written in it. I don't see what Apple gains from going their own way. Maybe Vulkan will rot by committee like OpenGL once did, but that hasn't happened yet.
Even without a standard, people will create abstractions on top so all you need to do is add support to those abstractions. If needing to conform to a standard was hampering Apple's ability to get developers to make software for their platforms they would add support. It's obviously not materially affecting them.
I think this whole thread is besides the point anyway.
VisionOS doesn't support VR gaming at a basic controller level. All it can do is the same traditional console controllers that other Apple devices support (PlayStation, Switch, Xbox, etc).
Metal vs. DirectX vs. Vulkan isn't the problem, the basic input devices and lack of interoperability with other non-graphics VR tooling/SDKs are the problem.
I know that Apple doesn't see it as a gaming device and mostly sucks at interfacing with the non-mobile gaming sphere, but if they had come out of the gate with messaging that was more like "We have built-in support for popular VR controllers, game developers can just do XYZ simple thing to port their games to VisionOS," they would have had some immediate momentum to help bolster the other select few things the device excels at.
But as it stands, nobody can make any of the kinds of abstractions you are referring to because the hardware is not capable of using the basic input devices that VR games depend on. Full stop.
Instead, prospective buyers are almost certainly comparing the Vision Pro with devices like the Meta Quest Pro and thinking "well, the Apple thing does some Apple stuff that nothing else can do, but I can't even play any occasional VR games on my Vision Pro and it's literally the most expensive headset money can buy."
The truth of the matter is that a Quest 3 can do pass-through vision, VR web content, and web browsing along with a decent selection of non-gaming apps at a tiny fraction of the cost of a Vision Pro and you don't even lose all that much due to it being less premium and advanced.
Even if we are comparing against a hypothetical $999 future Vision device where the external battery is gone and it weighs less it still doesn't compare all that well in that context. An analogy would be like if the iPhone wasn't allowed to make video calls and Android was. Maybe I don't use video calling every day but I can't justify buying a phone that doesn't have a feature like that as a concept.
IMO Apple thinks that controlling the device with just the hands and no controllers is the future. They feel like they have the iPhone all over again and that all the competitors using the metaphorical stylus and built-in keyboard are wrong. But as we found out with the iPad, sometimes a specialized input device (Apple Pencil) does serve a specific subset of customers very well to the point where it's considered a basic necessity.
I am quite certain the folks selling iOS games see it otherwise.
Most of those games could be written to run on a toaster. Most of those games are written by people who use Unity, so they don't really care about the underlying system and may not even understand what Metal is at all.
Such are the wonders of middleware, standards aren't really needed.
By the way, I am still waiting to see those toaster like games on WebGL 2.0.
The reality is that virtual reality and gaming technology have largely converged on DirectX and Vulkan for rendering.
I can empathize with Apple’s desire to get more adoption of Metal, but I predict it is an uphill battle to insist on it on platforms like spatial computing that is already having a very hard time to win adoption.
Forgetting about NVN and LibGNM/LibGNMX?
Maybe people would forget about them less often if they were allowed to talk about them
I think people are (rightfully) upset at the business-oriented decisions that limit MacOS as a platform, prevent competition on iOS and demand annual tithes from their developers like they're peons tilling land for coin. These are fair criticisms, prosecuted in a few courts even, and well within the realm of reasonable change.
Apple makes great things for their users when they collaborate with the industry. That's why we're concerned when they abandon standards and demand convergence on suspicious centralized cloud crap.
> That's why we're concerned when they abandon standards
Is DirectX a standard? Is Playstation NDK (or whatever it's called) a standard?
Vulkan is not a "standard". It's a designed-by-committee API that arrived on the scene years after "non-standard" APIs.
> It's a designed-by-committee API
So a "standard"?
Maybe I'm biased as I was involved with the standardization - but the whole point of a standard is something is legally possible to implement, communicates the needed information to the layer below, and general enough that it doesn't require specific hardware.
All boxes are checked by Vulkan? At least that was the intention.
So what if the origin of Vulkan was AMD's donation of Mantle, and the committee knocked the "hardware specific" points off - isn't that the desired result?
NVN on the Switch, PlayStation has two APIs, one high level and one low level one, LibGNMX and LibGNM respectively.
For some reason I can never remember those names :)
>Apple has made significant contributions to many open standards - for example, USB-C.
And then refused to use it until the EU forced them
USB-C has been in use on MacBooks for at least a decade.
Thank god they brought back MagSafe charging recently.
I lost a Mac laptop in the pre-MagSafe days, to a bullpen environment –a sysadmin was rushing to a meeting, snagged his foot, and took the cable and the laptop off the desk at high speeds.
After that, I was a big fan of MagSafe, but today’s USB-C and better batteries situation solves a lot of problems that MagSafe did in a different way. It allows for you to have multiple reasonably priced chargers, so the one on your desk can be safely placed, with a short unsnaggable cable. And you can still go to meetings and take your laptop home – because you have another cable in your bag and another at home.
So these days, I barely use the MagSafe cable on my MacBook Pro.
I agree with you, but in practice I've never had a problem with USB-C at all and everything mobile I own has USB-C except my face trimmer, and the next one will be USB-C for sure.
If you're worried about the port in a classroom environment you can use a short extension that you plug in on the device end, it will make the connection separate much easier if something unfortunate happens.
Come on. USB-C has been shipped on MacBooks since 2015, and most of their other systems since ~2020. Heck they caught a bunch of flack when they killed MagSafe on their MacBooks and went USB-C only (not just for the lack of mag safe, but also plenty of grief for lack of Ethernet and HDMI too). With or without the EU mandates they were clearly on a trend moving their devices to USB-C
USB-C is not a Khronos standard.
OpenGL is quite dated for VR/AR. In the Apple ecosystem they supported OpenGL 4.1 for quite some time before moving to Metal, which was announced 2 years before Vulkan.
If you spent the time developing an in house graphics API since open standards weren’t moving forward, why would you rewrite everything a second time just a few years later? Shouldn’t you expect to get a decade or two out of your existing API and only do the massive rewrite when the benefits become more substantial?
Vulkan & OpenGL applications can translate to Metal with MoltenGL and MoltenVK, respectively.
> OpenGL is quite dated for VR/AR.
Vulkan and DirectX are the favored graphics rendering technologies for VR.
Godot supports Vulkan rendering via OpenXR.
To get a vibe for Apple’s general posture in this regard it is worth noting that Vulkan rendering through OpenXR on macOS is technically possible via MoltenVK, but macOS does not have an official OpenXR runtime. You’d need to use third-party workarounds or wait for broader support.
macOS used to have OpenVR support (SteamVR) around 2017 for the HTC Vive, yes, but never any OpenXR runtime as no later hmds had macOS support.
> why would you rewrite everything a second time just a few years later?
Why is this the dichotomy? Why not support both?
Money
> If you spent the time developing an in house graphics API since open standards weren’t moving forward, why would you rewrite everything a second time just a few years later? Shouldn’t you expect to get a decade or two out of your existing API and only do the massive rewrite when the benefits become more substantial?
I have a natural inclination to agree with this thinking, but I think it's important to recognize that this is the sunk cost fallacy at work[1].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost
In an ideal world, Apple would have just built DirectX and sold the Xbox too. But you can't look at it from an executive's perspective, you have to look at it from the developer's point-of-view. This insistence on high-investment, low-ROI APIs is why the Mac doesn't have games. If you run the Metal playbook with VR again, you will have developers outright abandon you. We've already seen what happens.
Apple's GPUs support a decent chunk of the Vulkan featureset, you can go boot it up on an M1 with Asahi. Same goes for OpenXR. These are things that Apple neglects because they want to use their customerbase as leverage to market proprietary APIs. This hurts users, because Apple has neither industry-leading standards nor the leverage to force the industry to adapt. And they sure as hell lack the humility to just support both in the name of fair competition.
APIs are the last reason there aren't 'major' games on macOS. You've got architecture changes; PPC to Intel was a big loss of game compatibility, and then again when x86-32 support was removed from OS X nuked most of a user's Steam library.
And there's the chicken/egg problem of gamers just not being present in large enough numbers on macOS. The platform already has a fairly small marketshare in the overall PC space, the number of gamers are vanishingly much smaller; Steam stats put macOS at 1.58%, less than Linux.
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey
All of the major game engines support Apple's Metal, so API compat from that perspective isn't an issue.
APIs are the exact reason. Why can't you run Proton on MacOS? WoW64 works. Rosetta and Wine work. Is there any technical limitation besides API support preventing the Macbook from working like a Steam Deck?
Proton relies on Linux sys APIs not available on macOS, but the Porting Toolkit is available. I've been able to "play" Noita on my M2 Air (granted the perf sucks, but that's what I get for owning an Air). This discussion hasn't been centered around kernel APIs, but rather graphics APIs (D3D/Vulkan), if you're going for that "gotcha!".
Crossover is another option, though I have no need to pay for it as I own a Windows PC/consoles.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/gt3fat/proton...
It’s more that devs can’t be arsed to write non-mobile games in anything but DirectX unless they’re being paid to (as the console vendors do). Vulkan support is quite rare in commercial games, it’s almost entirely DirectX or Sony/Nintendo’s things. If Apple somehow flipped a switch that turned on Vulkan support, almost nothing would change.
The single biggest things Apple could do to bolster gaming on their platforms is to pay studios to do it or for Apple to license DirectX from MS. Anything else will barely move the needle.
> If Apple somehow flipped a switch that turned on Vulkan support, almost nothing would change.
That's not entirely true. Whiskey being depreciated to support Codeweavers was a headline story this week - something that outright would not need to exist if Apple users could run upstream DXVK instead of GPTk.
> pay studios to do it or for Apple to license DirectX from MS.
That doesn't work either! Paying Eidos and Capcom and Hello Games did not start an avalanche of ports. Apple could license DirectX from Microsoft, but they could also just support Vulkan 1.2 and get perfect DX12 coverage through translation.
The bigger point is that the Metal-only route isn't working. We can argue over the merits of Vulkan until the cows come home, but the simple issue is that Metal doesn't get ports. Native APIs on Apple platforms just get ignored.
The bigger point is that the Metal-only route isn't working.
For macOS, no. For iOS, yes, and that's where Apple makes almost all their revenue. Apple wants your primary target to be iOS. If you decide to do a macOS port, that's nice but not essential. Of course this doesn't work for AAA games, but that's a sacrifice they're happy to make.
Ah, I guess that is why Nintendo and Sony also don't have games.
>This insistence on high-investment, low-ROI APIs is why the Mac doesn't have games
Yeah, that's why iOS doesn't have any games either. /s
> Hell would freeze over before Apple conformed and contributed to an existing open standard.
Why the vitriol?
Apple did in fact initiate and co-create the WebGPU standard [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebGPU
Edit to include quote of parent comment.
I don’t know that that is relevant.
In this context, what’s relevant is OpenXR. Apple’s visionOS does not natively support OpenXR, the open standard developed by the Khronos Group for cross-platform AR/VR development. Apple has not indicated any plans to adopt OpenXR, choosing instead to promote its proprietary frameworks such as ARKit, RealityKit, and PolySpatial for spatial computing on the Vision Pro.
What Apple is finding, however, is that there’s virtually no consumer or developer appetite for visionOS / Vision Pro.
You probably didn't see the comment I was replying to. I should have quoted:
> Hell would freeze over before Apple conformed and contributed to an existing open standard.
This is patently false given the fact I posted.
I don't see how you can say it's patently false. Do you have any proof that hell didn't freeze over before then?
An excellent comment for it's humor value. (not to ruin the humor with an explanation, but this is a masterful use of sophistry as it's logically sound, but clearly not a serious argument).
Now to add to the unhelpfulness in what I hope is a humorous way, we in fact have some evidence that hell did freeze over:
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/01/08/260735693...
Ahhh Khronos. Lovely Fahrenheit where Microsoft strung SGI along to make Fahrenheit fail (now Open Scene Graph) and incorporate the IP in Direct3D.. Shitty tactics.
It's a miracle they actually allowed Microsoft to be a member of the Khronos group.
I should try an make an image of Fahrenheit's beta cds some day.
It's my impression that the WebGPU spec design team went to extreme lengths to accommodate Apple's wishes, and Apple in turn does not even support WebGPU in Safari. Why not express vitriol? Apple does not seem to act in good faith.
WebGPU works just fine in Safari on my iPhone. It was enabled by default starting with iOS 18.2.
https://caniuse.com/webgpu
Caniuse says it's still behind a feature flag, are you sure you didn't enable that at some point?
I don’t recall enabling it.
This doesn't load for me on my iPhone or iPad:
https://webgpu.github.io/webgpu-samples/?sample=texturedCube
I dug into my iPad and found a feature flag to enable it, hiding in settings/Safari/Advanced.
So definitely not enabled by default yet.
Confirmed my M1 iPad Pro iOS 18.4.1 also doesn’t have it enabled. Took a bit of digging in the settings app to discover where to enable feature flags too, confirmed it’s off.
It’s disabled still on my iPhone on iOS 18.4.1. Either it was enabled specifically on 18.2, and then disabled, or you enabled it manually. (Or some other weird thing, like it’s only enabled on iPhone Pros.)
Because getting angry about things that are false is insane.
WebGPU is still in progress in Safari - it is available as a technology preview. The same is true for Firefox.
> WebGPU is still in progress in Safari
That's kind of the point, Chrome shipped it across multiple platforms two years ago, while Safari still has no timeframe despite having a much narrower set of APIs and hardware to support. Firefox at least has the excuse of needing broad compatibility like Chrome but with a fraction of the development resources. Apple are just dragging their feet.
> That's kind of the point, Chrome shipped it across multiple platforms two years ago
Chrome ships a lot of things. Even now WebGPU is marked as experimental technology on MDN.
WebGPU didn't even become a Candidate Recommendation until December 2024 (half a year ago)
> Apple are just dragging their feet.
Or they are not in any rush to implement APIs that haven't reached consensus, haven't passed reviews, are subject to change etc. Chrome has very very cavalier attitude towards shipping APIs.
> Chrome shipped it across multiple platforms
Chrome has routinely shipped junk APIs with no concern for privacy, security or battery life.
It's why fingerprinting works so incredibly well on their browsers.
> Cross-platform dev is for low-rent chumps, unless it's our cross-platform dev
From an article talking about their decision to build WebGPU[1]. I was definitely being dramatic, but do think that Apple's overall vibe doesn't mesh well with open standards.
[1]: https://www.theregister.com/2017/02/08/apple_webgpu/
POSIX? C++? HTML? USB? There are plenty of existing open standards that Apple conforms and contributes to.
When open source types complain about this, I always enjoy the irony that macOS is POSIX compliant while Linux is not.
Those are fantastic examples. At the same time it begs the question: why does Apple not play nicely with graphics standards? It could be that the those standards bodies are dysfunctional or too slow so Apple has to go their own way. However, I suspect that that is not the main reason.
Being too slow certainly seems to be part of it. Metal was released two years before Vulkan, for example.
Correct... But from my understanding... OpenXR isnt reliant on OpenGL? it supports Vulkan, DirectX and metal -- https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/98872
"Hell would freeze over before Apple conformed and contributed to an existing open standard."
Counterpoint: WebKit and Swift.
> I would insist Apple conforms to the industry standard
Insisting Apple conforms to anything is useless, unless you're in control of government regulations.
You can stick to Apple's ridiculous custom APIs, or you can release your software without Apple support. Luckily, VisionOS seems to have gone the way of the Apple Pippin, so I don't think many people will care much about Apple's headsets not being supported by VR games. Apple certainly doesn't.
If Godot wants VisionOS support, this is probably the way to do it. The question then becomes: is an alteration this heavy worth the maintenance cost, especially for hardware that expensive and uncommon? You don't want to end up in a situation where the one guy with such a headset falls ill and suddenly you can't test your engine anymore without spending a couple thousand on new hardware.
Apple wants Godot to support the Vision Pro, hence the PR. Hence Godot has some leverage here (though possibly not enough).
They could just politely declare that visionOS / Vision Pro is not a big enough platform to warrant the distraction (opportunity cost).
That is my recommendation.
Heck, the PR comment even asks that someone creates a vision OS logo (you would think Apple would include it)!
Godot supports lots of niche platforms, it even supports the editor on Android and web. It won't be turned down for this reason.
It's a pretty well self regulating issue, isn't it? If there is no maintainer available, there's no market either, so it could be dropped. If there's enough people to develop for this expensive uncommon system, then surely there's enough money going round to pay someone.
Right now it looks like they have enough first party support and third party dyi efforts to at least give it a go.
> VisionOS seems to have gone the way of the Apple Pippin
There are rumours indicating that they working on multiple new models including one designed for tethering to the Mac:
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/04/13/vision-pro-2-two-rumore...
There were rumors indicating that they were working on the AVP for almost a decade before it was announced. With Apple, rumors have less to do with an imminent release and more to do with marketing, particularly to investors: such gossip placates those who are getting antsy that Apple might get left behind, especially when (as with VR) other big tech names like Facebook and Google are obviously moving to box Apple out.
If VisionOS comes back, it will be in a "Prey" or "Marathon"-like manner (or, best-scenario, A User Environment Reborn).
There is no need to have Apple conform to it, you can just expose the functionality, like this plugin does
https://github.com/jamuus/OpenVision/tree/main
Which was used by a community effort to bring VisionOS support to Godot:
https://github.com/jamuus/godot-vision
This would get you, maybe, VR/AR games/apps running on the device.
The PR from Apple also adds support for "flat" Godot games/apps running on Vision Pro.
This PR specifically is about getting Godot able to build for visionOS.
Even if Godot insisted on needing OpenXR support , you’d still need to land this PR to get the engine itself to work first.
Apple has no intention of fitting within godot’s GTM strategy for VR via OpenXR standard.
Amongst other signals, the PR comment says: “To support creating Immersive experiences by using a new Godot's visionOS VR Plugin.”
Okay? That still doesn’t mitigate the need for this specific PR first though to even get to that discussion point. That line you mention is not part of the contents of this PR.
A good partner discusses startegy and shared interest first, negotiates terms of engagement, tradeoffs, shared roadmaps, etc.
Instead we get a pretty arrogant and presumptive interaction from the Apple crew.
It should be noted that Apple is struggling with visionOS and Pro adoption amongst consumers and developers, so their arrogance is unwarranted and they cannot rely on market power.
How is it arrogant? What should they do instead?
It feels like we're reading different discussions. All I see is Apple engineers addressing every raised concern.
Getting angry at companies for contributing to OSS is not the hill to die on. If it is -- I can't even imagine your feelings towards Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, Google, etc. for their contributions to Linux.
That’s what this PR is! It’s a first attempt to start that dialogue. You can even see the employee trying to address notes as they come in, and asking if there are better ways they should align with Godot.
Point to the arrogance involved. From all your comments I can see you have an intense distaste for Apple and I honestly feel it’s colouring your perception of this change.
The only person who seems upset is you. The Godot maintainers are positive, Miguel is positive.
Should contributors never open PRs until they’ve discussed it first? What if they want to get feedback on an idea in code form?
> Instead we get a pretty arrogant and presumptive interaction from the Apple crew.
You're being completely ridiculous here. It's a well-written, considered, appropriate for the project PR.
No one is being forced at gun point to accept it.
If Godot does nothing and insists that it's on Apple to to support OpenXR, then VR developers who want to support the Vision Pro will have to use Unity or Unreal or some other non-Godot engine. It achieves nothing other than to reduce Godot's relevance. Godot isn't big enough to pressure Apple.
Considering install base, I'd figure the Vision Pro isn't big enough to pressure Godot.
Good thing I never mentioned anything about anyone pressuring Godot
Apple is big enough to sponsor Godot and should if they want to burden their maintainers with extra work long term.
I agree. I'm just saying that the result of responding "no, we won't accept this PR because we won't support visionOS until it supports OpenXR" only results in Godot not support ion visionOS. It doesn't result in visionOS gaining OpenXR support.
Now that doesn't mean it would be the wrong choice for the Godot project, they don't have to support visionOS.
This indicates to me that the Apple Vision and visionOS product line and OS are not canceled internally and that Apple is still committed to its future.
While the Apple Vision Pro itself is not a good or successful product, progress in display technology will enable Apple to build a more attractive consumer product, in the form of light, comfortable and unobtrusive AR glasses.
In this line of thinking — not just focusing on the flopped AVP but looking at the product line on the long term - I think it makes sense for this OS to be added to Godot.
I do think the concern for who will carry the maintenance burden is valid. In my experience, Apple hasn’t been the most responsive company when it comes to obscure bugs or issues with their API (e.g. with Cocoa). I would be wary of depending on continued support from a large tech company that can change its goals at any time.
All that being said, this is exciting!
> While the Apple Vision Pro itself is not a good ... product
I must admit I'm baffled by this reaction to the first model:
* It's clearly far more impressive technologically than any competitor.
* The price point clearly indicates it wasn't aimed at the general consumer, which is normal for such a massive technological leap compared to their other recent consumer stuff (e.g. the apple watch).
* They got loads of feedback
* Nobody who is this critical seems to articulate what success would have looked like.
> in the form of light, comfortable and unobtrusive AR glasses.
This just seems like a fantasy. I don't understand why people expect this is possible. Battery alone precludes this. Even just streaming video back and forth is going to be too power-hungry for serious use with lightweight glasses.
The Vision Pro could easily have been successful if they'd invested an additional 10% of it's R&D budget into software development, and released a suite of tools that actually leveraged what the platform was capable of.
It's incredibly impressive tech but just not worth it if all there is to do is to have ipad apps floating in the air around me.
It does a lot more than iPad apps. Coexisting 3-D volumetric apps with 2D app is quite innovative and not even an android XR will be able to do that in its first release. What’s software development tools do you think it’s missing?
Hey! They have 3D TV too! Didn't you want even more inconvenient 3D TV?
Honestly yes. It's by far the highest quality implementation of 3D TV or 3D Film I have ever viewed. Avatar 2 and IMAX films in particular are stupendous. I really don't have an adjective to describe how much better stereo content in the VisionPro is over every other display device or theater.
Exactly. 3D TV wasn’t a bad idea. It was just pushed a bit too hard too soon. There’s a reason 3D movies are still popular in theaters; people genuinely enjoy them and are willing to pay at least some premium for them.
Frankly, I’d much rather have a 3D TV than a “smart” TV.
The fact that the AVP gives you fully isolated video streams for each eye is what makes it kickass compared to any glasses-filtering based display. It's perfect stereo.
What sets it apart from things like Meta Quest is Apple's best-in-class video rental / stream / purchase infrastructure all going back to the original iTunes.
And then you have apps like Disney Plus that fully support it.
Same reaction. The vision pro is clearly a great headset. The biggest thing restraining it has been the ability to program for it. If Apple will not let 3rd party devs access the primitives needed to create game engine support then Apple needs to lend that support. Here they are
The biggest thing restraining it is the ergonomics and form factor. No one wants face PCs. Imagine how women, who are half the population, and who spend 0.5T dollars a year on hair and makeup products, are going to deal with smashing a 1.5 pound PC into their faces and held in place with straps around their head and hair. SJ would have smothered that thing in the crib the second his team had no answer for how a product that excludes half the population at the get go could possibly be successful. Can you imagine iPhone shipping in a form factor that required women redo their hair and makeup after every single use?
I want a face PC, if it's a VisionPro; just can't afford one. My wife wants one more than I do. Two counter-examples for you there.
1. That's an anecdote, but you know that. I'm going to guess that the wife of someone on this forum is nerdier than average.
2. Even if you WANT a face PC, that doesn't mean you'll love using it and keep it once the honeymoon wears off. Supposedly over half of VR headset owners use their device less than once per month.
I used to want a headset. I bought a Valve Index. Everything about the device was fantastic. The games were fantastic. But then I sold it about 6 months later because, meh, it's just not something that was practical and usable frequently enough.
So right now we have basically ideal headsets Meta Quest 3/3S which are excellent, dirt cheap, lightweight, and have a large software catalog but they still struggle to retain users and grow the market.
The Vision Pro hasn't even resolved motion sickness for 100% of users. You can love it and still be forced to discontinue use one by something you can't control about your own body.
> So right now we have basically ideal headsets Meta Quest 3/3S
Cmon, it has shitty hardware and shittier software. The only thing going for it is price and a game catalogue they've basically purchased. Which is admittedly a formidable combo, but it's clear nobody wants it. There's no leverage to make them actually cater to the consumer.
I would say cost is the hardest part to swallow—hence why I think it's ludicrous to even vaguely suggest it's aimed at general consumers. But i suppose it's difficult to tease these things apart.
> Battery alone precludes this. Even just streaming video back and forth is going to be too power-hungry for serious use with lightweight glasses.
I know this is obvious, but the battery doesn't have to go in the glasses. When the glasses are just a wireless monitor, it opens up all sorts of possibilities for belttop computers. Obviously, the glasses still need some power, but the battery can be very small, comparatively. Put the weight and heat into something with a mobile phone form factor.
Apple Watch -> $250
iPhone 16 Pro Max -> $1200
iVirt -> $2400
iVirt LTE -> $3200
iGlass -> $600
Now you can charge $3000 for you VR kit, but claim it only costs $2400. Plus people shell out $600 for the glasses even though they don't have the CPU. They just want to look like they do. Or they buy multiple pairs for different locations or as backups or whatever. The profit on the glasses could be huge. Especially if they could replace the Apple Watch for some people.
Googling "belttop" just shows belts. To what are you referring? Are you suggesting wiring the glasses to some battery stored elsewhere? Sure you can do that, but I thought people these days hated wires (in spite of an objectively superior interface to wireless). But you certainly can't power streaming for it (for more than say an hour) with the battery you can actually store in glasses.
I've never even heard of an iVert.
> Plus people shell out $600 for the glasses
I want to sell these people a bridge. Pray tell me where I can find them because their money is absolutely begging to be taken for a pittance. Who the fuck is paying $600 for $5 of plastic?
Edit: i realize i only addressed part of your comment. I think I get that you're trying to convey an iVert as an apple product, right?
> Now you can charge $3000 for you VR kit, but claim it only costs $2400. Plus people shell out $600 for the glasses even though they don't have the CPU. They just want to look like they do. Or they buy multiple pairs for different locations or as backups or whatever. The profit on the glasses could be huge. Especially if they could replace the Apple Watch for some people.
Do we have evidence they aren't subsidizing this? If you can't look at production cost this speculation seems useless. And to claim that $2400 is any more within the realm of affordability is insane. If they actually wanted normal people to bite they'd have priced it at ~$700. This is for rich people and reviewers only.
Oh this is definitely for rich people only. I thought that was a given. Who else spends $1200 on a laptop every two years? Who else spends $300 on a watch? We're looking for people who spend $200-500 on sunglasses--the non-electronic kind.
You ask where to find these people? Visit your closest Apple store. Or a rodeo arena. Or a Tesla charging lot. Or a Whole Foods market. The United States is crawling with these people.
It is a technological tour de force and an amazing demo of what's possible and what is soon to come. But if we define a "good product" to mean a commercially successful one, then it isn't very successful. Still, I'm hoping it won't be killed and that it will continue to evolve and become successful eventually.
> But if we define a "good product" to mean a commercially successful one
Why would we define a "good product" as a "successful product"? These are 2 different things. There are many ways to define a "good product" (is it useful? is it well made? is it innovative?), success is something else. All combinations of good-bad / successful-unsuccessful are possible.
Thats a very naive understanding of success. Youre telling the soap maker on etsy doesnt have a successful product because she doesnt sell a million units a day? Youre telling me that Rolls Royce Aerospace isn't successful because they only 100 aircraft engines a year?
That soap maker didn't spend $10B in R&D figuring out how to make the soap. Your retort makes zero sense. Apple's worst products sold tens of millions of units in their first couple of years while Vision Pro sold about 370K units in year 1 and well into year 2 still has plenty of inventory sitting on warehouse shelves to cover all of 2025 demand. It literally bombed in the market. It's an abject failure of a product that couldn't be called a success in any way beyond a great prototype and some excellent demoware. It's a flop and a joke.
It didn’t bomb in the market. It was priced for supply constraints. They basically tied Meta on all headset revenue in its first year (450k units and $1.4 billion). visionOS is a triumph and foundation for the next decade of computing, and the entire product line of Apple is adapting to its look and feel. The entire XR / VR industry is changing their strategy to respond to visionOS , particularly Meta horizon OS which has incorporated numerous improvements that were directly inspired by Apple. And plenty of Apple products sold a lot less than 10 million annually to this day.
> It literally bombed in the market.
Compared to what?
> abject failure
Applying this to apple is beyond comprehension... What do you mean by using such a term? Apple is likely the richest single entity to have every existed, outside of perhaps the US economy as a whole. This single vr product line made apple more money than either of us will make in a lifetime. So hopefully i'm mistaken and you can educate me as to what the word means.
But hopefully you meant "objective". Which is still stupid, but is at least a familiar and manageable form of stupidity.
I assume the GP means "successful in the market" by "successful product". They're distinguishing between something that might be successful otherwise and something that is successful as a product.
I get that part entirely! It's the conflation of "good" and "successful" that I find confusing.
>* It's clearly far more impressive technologically than any competitor.
Technology hardly makes a product.
>The price point clearly indicates it wasn't aimed at the general consumer,
You don't put your CEO on the cover of Vanity Fair and devote half your retail space and staff to it if it's not for the general consumer.
>* They got loads of feedback
Not as much as they hoped. They hoped to have 500K units in the wild in the first year and ramp up for the second year to a meaningful production run but that never happened because demand fell off a cliff once the fanboys got theirs and so the feedback is very, very limited and mostly negative or untrustworthy.
>* Nobody who is this critical seems to articulate what success would have looked like.
Apple scale scales. Meet or break Watch's first 2 year sales maybe? Watch, derided as a failure in the first year actually sold about ~20M units across both year 1 and year 2. Vision Pro will sell fewer than 500K units across year 1 and 2. 500K units!! One doesn't need to define success when failure is so easily defined here.
>Even just streaming video back and forth is going to be too power-hungry for serious use with lightweight glasses.
Spectacles will be entirely different technology stacks. See the Meta Orion prototype for example. You are correct, battery is an issue. Even bigger though is heat. Can't let things get smartphone hot on your face or it's game over. Anyway, expect low-res, narrow field of view, 2D overlays, more like your car's HUD than the immersive experience of goggles. But at least spectacles have a chance where goggles clearly do not, as demonstrated at both the high end and low end by Apple and Meta.
They had about 450 K units in the wild in the first year. They will sell around 600 K units of the first version until the second one is released later this year. This was on a potential production target of 900 K units. So it’s not exactly a failure so much as an underperform due to them over pricing it for supply constraints.
VisionOS is clearly a triumph and the basis of UX for their entire product line. The scepticism is gonna age like those who were sceptical about the original Mac and Windows. Vision Pro isn’t even all that expensive by historical standards.
I believe there's going to be a lot more investment if no other reason than Tim Cook seems to care deeply about it (and beating Zuckerberg).
Strategically it make sense. The only real threat to the iPhone which Apple makes all their money from, is a new form factor that replaces phones. Maybe glasses/goggles will never replace phones, but spending billions a year to make sure that you win the glasses market just in case they do is very cheap insurance.
https://futurism.com/tim-cook-obsession-ar-glasses
>> https://futurism.com/tim-cook-obsession-ar-glasses
Red Flags!
>> "Tim cares about nothing else," an insider with knowledge of the matter told Gurman. "It’s the only thing he’s really spending his time on from a product development standpoint."
>> he's looking to beat Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg — who shares an obsession with AR and VR headsets — to market.
Is Tim Cook a product person now?
Does Apple care about being first now (instead of being best)?
Before the Vision Pro release we heard similar reporting from Gurman (1) (and recall the skepticism about Gurman's reporting: 2)
Yet here we are. After a decade of promoting AR (3) Tim Apple released a headset of which "the weirder things about visionOS (and the Vision Pro itself, really) is that there’s not a lot of true AR in the mix" (4)
Red Flags!
1. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-05-18/apple-s-m...
2. https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/05/18/gurman-headset-...
3. https://www.theverge.com/21077484/apple-tim-cook-ar-augmente...
4. https://www.theverge.com/24054862/apple-vision-pro-review-vr...
Cook took all of the top Vision Pro talent and put them to work on Siri. Those who didn't go are either working on the spectacles (no relationship at all to the tech in the goggles) or they're working to clear out the pipleline of goggles work that's already close to finished that they can deploy along with a new model that uses mostly the same components as the first which lets them make their supply chain whole after they ended production well short of what they promised their component makers. Rather than leave their supply chain high and dry and their developers disappointed with early cancellation, they'll make one more go of it to buy themselves the time to progress on spectacles (again, totally unrelated tech) so Cook can claim that goggles evolved into spectacles rather than admit that goggles bombed and they're retrenching around spectacles and that entirely different tech stack and approach, for which zero of the goggles investment by Apple or 3rd party developers will transfer.
You’re covering this board with statements of rumor, personal opinion and conjecture, as if they were statements of fact and getting the rumours wrong consistently. The Vision Pro leader, Mike Rockwell, runs both visionOS and Siri/AI. Many of his lieutenants are working on Siri, while many are staying on visionOS. The architectural approach and UX of visionOS is infecting the entire software group.
Goggles have not bombed, and are not going away for at least a decade. Apple will not be abandoning visionOS for spectacles, I know you keep repeating this, but it’s false.
The product line not being cancelled hasn’t been in question lately: https://www.macrumors.com/roundup/apple-vision-pro/#apple-vi...
It was never (yet) cancelled.
The first "cancelled" reporting was Gurman saying that they'd moved on to spectacles which is true, much of the talent was reassigned to other projects including AR spectacles.
The next reports said Vision Pro was over but a Vision "lite" was on the way to give it one more go.
The next reports said the Vision Pro chip and ship minor spec bump plus a lighter cheaper version.
The next reports said Vision, unclear pro or lite, plus tethered goggles (PCVR for Mac, probably like the Beyond 2 but shiny and metal.)
The reports after that said most of the top talent from the Vision Pro teams has moved to Siri to rescue it and AI.
So, we've got most of the talent moved to spectacles and Siri, and a tethered device and an all-in-one device on the table.
Those are mostly likely last ditch attempts at rescuing the massive R&D investment and equally important, a chance to make their supply chain whole after ending production short of what Apple promised them. We'll see the next products integrate nearly all of the components of the first and that'll clear the decks for their suppliers so they're not left high and dry as well as letting their devs get one more crack at things and ship the VisionOS 3.0 stuff they've been hard at work on this last year.
Making your devs and supply chain happy is hardly a drop in the bucket cost wise compared to the investment already made so that's what they're doing.
They'll try a cheaper version of the immersive all-in-ones and a PCVR version that strips out the PC they've spent 10 years and $10B integrating to see if a display peripheral for $2K will beat an all-in-one face PC at $4K (but that won't give Cook the new platform he was hoping to own and monetize, just another accessory for SJ's creations.)
The core idea is solid. At this point it just needs to be lighter, have better battery, and a much lower price. With further refinement and increased economies of scale these issues could potentially be fixed.
Nearly all of the reviews I’ve read say that it’s a good user experience overall, but it’s not worth the price.
It doesn't need a battery at all. Just have it connect directly to a Mac to use as a virtual Mac display. It's what I use my Vision Pro for as its primary use case, to have an ultra-wide monitor in front of me without taking up any physical space. I use it for hours every day as my primary programming platform.
I really have no other use case, and don't need the VR/AR features. The virtual ultra-wide display of the latest VisonOS updates, which has the area of 2 4k monitors, is just amazing for coding. It's an incredible user experience and worth every penny for the Vision Pro for that alone.
Throwing away some of the AR/VR features and using it as a virtual display only would make it lighter and smaller. I could use something that doesn't block me from taking a drink while I code, for example. I couldn't care less about video games as well.
Apple (and Meta) didn't want a great PC accessory, they wanted new platforms they could own and monetize. They spent 10 years, both of them, integrating the whole PC inside the goggles because the display only approach had little value to them. Apple may try a PCVR headset, probably similar to the Beyond 2 but with glass and aluminum instead of plastic, as "big Mac display" is the only value any decent number of Vision Pro users get from their devices and Apple's got plenty of unused component supply and supply chain lined up already, but goggles are likely a dead form factor.
Man, I don't even bother using the ultra-wide monitor on my desk. The screen on my laptop can already display orders of magnitude far more information than I can easily process at one time. Even with contexts where I'm comfortable managing windows/buffers manually (e.g. emacs) there's simply too much space to easily manage. What do you do with all that space? Is it just pulling up every possible resources at once so you don't need to bother doing anything more than moving your eyes to switch contexts? How often are you switching contexts?
I find the extra space useful over just a laptop screen for coding - I can have a simulator to one side, and a coding window open with a good amount of space for metadata sidebars, along with a window or two for code documentation.
Where it really shines though is for photo review and editing. There it is spectacular to have so much space for image review even with a good number of adjustment controls up.
The other thing the screen is great is for use on a plane. No-one can see what you are working on, but it's also a kindness to others since your laptop screen is totally dark. It was really nice working on an international flight with the AVP and a laptop.
I appreciate the insight. I definitely understand why you might prefer this, especially with the in flight example and the photo editing. The one example I came up with internally was video editing/viewing, which seems to align quite well.
And yet I have people constantly telling me how they have four monitors set ups and still not enough screen real estate… and this is why they don’t like the Vision Pro, which can only give you one big ultra wide max.
I've yet to meet someone with strong preference for screen real estate that could back it up with productivity. Sometimes people just want stimulation.
Edit: i have no gripe with these people, I just simply don't buy that they're more productive. We all need our comforts. Mine is music.
There's nothing really to "throw away" that would make it slighter and smaller whilst still keeping your desired feature set.
The reality is that you're using the VR/AR features in one specific way - not that you're not using VR/AR
It's possible a slightly weaker CPU or GPU could be used but I don't think so and in any case the effects of that would be on cost not on weight. And I don't think the difference would be significant.
If used as a display only, get rid of the M2 CPU subsystem, get rid of the external display, and maybe some of the cameras.
The external display being the EyeSight thing? I agree there. That's an expensive boondoggle that will probably be missing in the next iteration in any case.
I don't think you can get rid of cameras without reducing the gesture tracking fidelity. That's the reason the Vision Pro has so many cameras.
> M2 CPU subsystem
Not clear on what this means without looking up the spec sheet. Do you mean "use a slower CPU" or something else? If the former - it won't help that much with size or weight.
Sounds like you're really looking for something like the Bigscreen Beyond?
Congratulations, you just reinvented a decade old discontinued Microsoft products, Windows MR and HoloLens, which ended up being subsidization program for SteamVR and a pure tech demo.
Did not know HoloLens had 23megapixel displays to show high resolution text for coding. It must have been really useful back then with such a high resolution display that you could use for coding all day.
People really need to understand that its the details that make a product viable, not the concept.
HoloLens 2 had higher pixel density than AVP at 2K horizontal resolution at 43deg HFOV. So yeah, you just didn't know HoloLens had 23megapixel displays to show high resolution text for coding, nearly a decade ago.
The problem was the same as today. Dead numb market response to non-SteamVR VR/MR/AR/XR headsets.
HoloLens 1: 1280 x 720 (per eye)
HoloLens 2: 2048 x 1080 (per eye)
Vision Pro: 3660 x 3200 (per eye)
Yah no one was gonna buy HoloLens as a desktop monitor replacement. It really was a crap product.
People ARE using Vision Pro as a desktop monitor replacement.
> People ARE using Vision Pro as a desktop monitor replacement.
So do people with other headsets. AVP's uniqueness is that it's apparently useless for anything else whatsoever.
HoloLens 1 had nearly 40% higher PPD (47) than Apple Vision Pro (34).
So you're saying HoloLens had a tiny field-of-view because of its limited resolution?
Sure, but that PPD number is what prevents me from using these headsets as a primary display replacement. I personally don't need a virtual display that fills 100 degrees of my vision and would happily sacrifice FOV for something usable.
This is from someone who has spent hundreds of hours coding in VR, which currently requires big font sizes and screens that take up massive FOV, which I find very uncomfortable for extended periods.
Also two decades of headset display products that have existed the entire time VR has been a thing of pop culture interest, and yet has never been a product the masses give a fuck about.
The masses don't consume everything on their phones because they care about screen size or fidelity. Sure, they will buy phones with bigger and better screens than other phones, but if they want to do something on a big screen they will use their 60 inch 4k TV
In fact, the masses basically don't do computer stuff at all anymore.
I think those exist - look at Xreal glasses and etc? much lighter
No, it's not. The form factor cannot possibly shrink enough in size and weight or gain enough input ergonomics to make the gorgeous outputs worth it. Not gonna happen for goggles, ever. People won't smash a PC into their faces for no use cases beyond what their laptops and smartphones amply provide for. You think women who spend half a trillion dollars a year and an average of an hour a day on their hair and makeup are going to smash any kind of PC, no matter how small and light, into their faces requiring they redo their hair and makeup after every use? Really?
> The core idea is solid
What is the core idea?
I'd say the core idea is augmented reality. A HUD is a good place to start thinking about how this would be useful.
Spatial computing.
Spatial computing is to interact with and manipulate 3D space—blending the physical and digital worlds. It enables users to understand, interpret, and respond to the geometry, position, and movement of real-world environments.
I fail to see that as a future mode of user/computer interaction that competes with or augments mobile/laptop computer usage in any meaningful way.
Even movie watching, the most successful application of visionOS / Vision Pro, has limited use because it forces a solitary experience. While it can be useful (eg on a plane or in bed while your SO sleeps), you also already carry your phone and earbuds with you so it isn’t a compelling enough use case. Nobody is creating games for vision either and it I think it’s unlikely to become a favored general computing device or mode.
I can probably say more succinctly: spatial computing appears to be a classic case of a solution looking for a problem.
Prior art by Microsoft (HoloLens) and Google (Glass) are interesting because they occupied very different positions on the spatial computing spectrum, but in both cases they surfaced headwinds like the fact that people are unlikely to put glasses or headsets on the face/head juts in order to “compute”.
If there was a path to direct neural input or contact lens delivery, now we might be talking, but even then, you’ve solved the physical impediments but still don’t have a compelling general purpose computing use case.
Some would argue an addictive use case like porn can tip the scales, but I’m doubtful and, besides, I think we can be sure that Apple would never position themselves to depend on porn to advance their business interests.
It seems safe to predict that within 3 — 5 years Apple gives up on this vision. They might come back to it in the future but I think they’re more alarmed by the other computer interaction paradigm that is getting a lot more traction: GenAI/LLM, which subverts the need for a rich visual display and fits and extends all our other computing models more elegantly.
I think you're looking at the command line and saying a mouse is a solution looking for a problem.
Its not just about manipulating objects spatially. You could do that on a desktop screen with a wii-mote. The other aspect of the form factor is that its an always on, omni-present display, with awareness of the user's surroundings.
This unlocks the ability for apps to be locked to specific locations and contexts, to overlay information on the world, and to, as you stated, manipulate them in a spatial way.
Once the UX itself isn't an uncomfortable hassle, the use cases are really very easy to imagine.
> solution looking for a problem
I think it's not actually that bad a situation, to me I think we're just at matters of degree. To explain:
It's not that people can't see that it might be super nice to have an experience kind of like the AVP for a few already-known problems:
1. As an alternative to a big, heavy, non-portable display(s) or a bulky laptop for people who can't always just work at a desk.
2. As an alternative to a TV
3. Fun gaming applications. For instance, MarioKart Home Circuit is a neat game that uses physical karts with cameras, which you play on the TV, but imagine how cool it would be if kids could run around the house and the neighborhood with friends in AR racing karts that only you can see.
1 and 2 are already perfectly there, and obviously a very small number of games that take advantage of VR exist, but they're not that ambitious.
The issue though is that nobody wants those 'problems' solved badly enough to (A) pay $3500+ plus tax for it, nor (B) wants to wear a very heavy and awkward-looking helmet with poor battery life.
The promise is there. If a device can be made that is far lighter, can fold to fit in a coat pocket, with better battery life, and costing $1000, that could go a long way to being something people would find well worth the effort of carrying around and worth the cost. If everybody has one and it's comfortable and light, watching movies on it together, either on an awesome AR screen with atmospheric effects, or in a VR movie theater could be a fun experience rather than look like an absurd antisocial nerd thing.
All this will require investment and improvement of the tech, and will require a healthy developer ecosystem, but with those pieces I'd give the idea itself a good shot. We'll see if Apple is willing or able to do either one. If not them, someone else might.
as an avp hobby dev i dont disagree with your prediction. its a product i want and think is good, but im sure most people dont want and think is bad.
i somewhat agree with your solution looking for a problem statement but i think a potential application for spatial computing is data collection and presentation. think of how many businesses depend on filling out forms to report on the state of a physical object/equipment. a spatial component where that form now has a location in space and the scene with the object can be reconstructed for review is valuable for businesses. to clarify, this is a case for spatial computing, not the avp. the avp is nowhere near rugged enough to do the job safely and one day the data collection is best handled by drones
GenAI/LLM slop subverts the need for a rich visual display. WTF. Please explain How does a statistic based lossy compression technique with high error rates does that?
It’s telling that the best use case Facebook could come up with for its AI YouTube commercial spam is “give me conversion starters” lol.
Spatial computing of iPad apps floating in the air with an even worse, low information rate input method?
Neat concept, kneecapped at birth by sandboxing requirements, App Store rules, and Apples desire to own all of the innovation that could happen on the platform.
Siri on visionOS is actually quite refreshing for its speech to text, it is almost entirely on device and very low latency, with much more accuracy than you see on iOS. The combination of a keyboard, trackpad, Siri, hand and eye tracking is incredibly high information rate input for me and it’s what I use for most of the day for the past eight months or so.
I also wished it was more Mac air than iPad but the remote wide curved desktop feature is VERY nice. It seems to me the next logical step is remote individual app display/controls.
Sadly the Adtech scumbags can’t help themselves from trying to steal all the data they can, just see how they ignore robots.Txt, download phone address/numbers lists, download the outlook data file until measures were added to stop that, paying game publishers to include libraries loaded with phone home calls, and ignoring do not track because $$$ > ethics. Heck even Nvidia video drivers phone home with collected metrics. Sandboxed operating systems based on bsd jails(iOS), flat pack and snaps (Linux), and chromeOS are a first step at stopping this unethical behavior. The good old days of trusting software from large companies not to install data harvesting spyware are long gone.
Can you read that much into it?
It seems equally possible that they're beginning to wind things down and they're just releasing what they've got to the public now.
Official upstreaming efforts are a significant investment even if they have internal PoCs. You can't just "release what you've got".
Not if it was 90% done and you want to clear the decks of nearly completed work before moving on. It's absolutely common to ship stuff to make third party suppliers and partners whole even when you've decided not to continue investing in a product. Keeping partners happy is critical to the smooth functioning supply chain Cook built and which gives Apple most of their success today.
A big feature like this will be at most 20-30% done when you open a PR, because the rest of the work is in collaboration to suit upstream which will as always require notable changes and rewrites.
Spending manweeks to manmonths on new upstream work that won't see any practical use until half to a whole year later, after getting legal to work things out, is a significant investment in new development.
This has nothing to do with suppliers or partners. They are not dumb enough to measure a product roadmap in number of random PRs, but will look at first party software and hardware roadmap.
Sure you can. That said, I'm not sure what Apple's usual style is and it might be pretty out of character (or not) to drop support shortly after an MR.
No you can't. Upstreaming a large feature like this requires at the very least allocating a number of manweeks to the upstreaming process, and that's without accounting for actually writing the feature in the first place. Making a PR and not following up would be worse PR (heh) than doing nothing, which is also costly.
If they had dumped a tarball or a fork somewhere with a hacked up PoC it could have looked like they just dumped what they had, but even that requires approvals and time from legal, and so someone has to decide its worth investing in.
(I have no interest in speculating about the Vision lineup itself, just commentating on open source contributions.)
You really don't understand how much money Apple's sunk on this and how little comparatively it takes to wind down operations in a way that makes partners and suppliers happy. Keeping a couple small teams going, even with entirely new versions shipping, to keep your supply chain whole and your partners coming back for future products is cheap and easy and very likely what Apple's doing now that most of the top talent was moved to spectacles and Siri. Letting your OS and partner software teams clear their pipelines is absolutely common at Apple and elsewhere. Denying that is silly.
Nothing about what you said binds Apple to following through. Just because it would be a bad idea doesn't mean they can't or won't.
They could also throw money out their window, light it on fire, let their employees do whatever they want instead of regular Apple work, etc.
A lot of managers (and legal) have to approve and allocate significant budget to bad ideas. Companies generally try to avoid doing bad ideas that are a net negative.
This is precisely what they're doing, shipping everything that was mostly already cooked, clearing out the pipleline for their own developers and for third parties, particularly the supply chain they left high and dry when they ended Vision Pro production early, but also their own OS devs and the ones working with third party software and content sponsorships.
They've already moved all the top talent and the next thing looks like a PCVR device that guts the PC from Vision Pro and maybe a chip and ship bump or even a cheaper model with sub-premium materials and lower fidelity optical stack.
What ever is going on, it's clearly not the priority it was and most people paying close attention see a steep decline in the viability of goggles at Apple. That form factor was a flop, as the ergonomics simply didn't align with the use cases for most normal people.
> While the Apple Vision Pro itself is not a good product
Do you own one, or have used one extensively, to dismiss it so confidently?
I own one, and it's a great product. The experience watching movies/shows is unparalleled.
Unfortunately the price tag is too high for me, and since I'm based in the Netherlands, I did not manage to schedule a demo. However, what makes a good product is subjective and you're right that in many ways it is a good product.
From what I can see, the hardware and software quality are high, and the user experience is greatly simplified in contrast to something like Meta Quest, which' UX is often rough and clunky.
My main argument for saying it's not a good product, is that the form factor is not where it should be for mass consumer appeal.
Another subjective and personal pet peeve is that it's not possible to create an AR experience using custom rendering logic with Metal. One has to use RealityKit. Only a fully immersive experience (VR) can be created with Metal. (This might have changed since it came out and I'm happy to be proven wrong, then I'll definitely buy one). I understand the reasoning behind locking this down, but I would love to experiment with writing AR 3D modeling software for visionOS.
Yeah - I thought it was a good product, just a way-too-expensive-to-ever-gain-popular-support, completely useless one since no developer wants to support a new Apple platform knowing how brutally Apple treats developers with their in-app-purchase nonsense, and Apple itself sure isn't doing anything to put any wood behind the arrow.
If Apple cared, they'd drop the money to get, say, immersive courtside experience at every NBA and NFL game for a subscription fee. New long-form immersive content, not these silly 5-10 minute videos they drop every month or two.
It's a great product. But Apple's not serious enough about it. Someone who can deliver at least one of "normal people can buy it" or "a ton of incredibly compelling content exists" will own this market, eventually. It probably won't be Apple.
" just a way-too-expensive-to-ever-gain-popular-support"
You assumed that models would stay that price forever???
"how brutally Apple treats developers with their in-app-purchase nonsense"
How is 15% brutal to have access to a market base of hundreds of millions of customers who can click to purchase without entering a credit card.
"Apple itself sure isn't doing anything to put any wood behind the arrow"
Of all the dumb things you said, this may possibly be the dumbest - though to be sure the other two items are incredibly stupid.
Apple has put a TON of effort into the Vision Pro. They have continued to produce high quality immersive content. They have obviously continued to work on new versions. They have recently put on an entire developer day program on producing immersive content (programmatic and video related). They have greatly improved the Mac mirroring features and added other good UI updates on a pretty continuous basis since launch.
Apple is doing all they can to move the platform forward, it just takes time to reduce costs. It's a platform well worth looking into supporting since Apple is obviously fully committed to it moving forward.
> You assumed that models would stay that price forever??
Apple didn't bother to try to keep the cost down on this version, and for Apple, cost plus the margins they demand dictated the high price.
> "How is 15% brutal to have access"
Okay, first of all, 30%. We're not talking indie devs with <1MM in revenue that can get the 15% deal for a little while. The kind of developers they need to make huge killer apps are ones like Epic, Blizzard, etc. And entertainment firms like Netflix, the ones Apple insists on soaking for 30% of revenue across the board, and those firms have voted with their feet and aren't embracing any Apple platforms. I don't care, I'm not and will never develop for Apple's various "stores" -- take your argument up with the developers who hate them. Nobody wants to give Apple another market to throw their considerable weight around in.
> "They have continued to produce high quality immersive content. They have obviously continued to work on new versions. They have recently put on an entire developer day program on producing immersive content (programmatic and video related)."
Big deal. There isn't enough content that even many big Apple fans who love the product in theory mostly don't use them and admit they were a poor investment. A couple silly 10 minute shorts a month isn't enough to justify it. If they cared, they'd put serious money - of which they have plenty - behind selling a device (any device!) at a compelling price even at a subpar margin. See gaming consoles. Or they'd do what it takes to get developers and content companies to produce content. That means sucking it up and offering better terms than they have on other platforms (or doing sweetheart deals, say, Amazon can sell on the Kindle iOS app with a 5% commission in exchange for promising to produce a ton of immersive content on AVP.) Whatever it takes.
They're not serious (at the top level -- i am sure the person just in charge of AVP is serious, but Tim's not on board enough to support them).
Their priority is not selling a mass market low margin product. That is Meta‘s strategy, and they’ve lost nearly $100b because they think it’s the future of all computing. The thing is, Apple agrees. But they’re not the kind of company to burn that kind of capital.
Vision Pro was all about selling an enthusiast device that pushes the boundaries of XR technology into what they thought was appropriate baseline that would shift the market. They succeeded at that, the entire market is changing their strategy to respond to visionOS. visionOS has set the baseline for spatial computing so much that even horizon OS is copying it now. Apple takes the product line very seriously, they they’re just playing a different game than you want them to play.
> Want them to
I mean, I don't care what they do (other than as a shareholder, lol. But it's not a major part of my portfolio.)
I just do not think they have made an impact on the mass-market -- and at their market cap, anything short of mass-market should be considered a failure and a distraction from products that actually sell.
"Horizon OS copying them" is flattering I guess, but they're not copying all the stupid things about AVP: The heavy, expensive metal construction, the silly outer display, the stupid tethered proprietary battery, the $3500 price tag. I do have a Quest 3 though, which is vaguely fun, but was an impulse buy I only occasionally use.
I've never even tried the AVP, and while that seems like a disqualification of me as a judge of it, that's just the point: I'm a geek. If even I dismiss it as a useless and overpriced toy, it will never be mass market, because normal people need more of a justification than I do to adopt a gadget. It needs to do something amazing that people immediately see the value of. Which is why I cited courtside NBA games (not a 10-minute short btw) as an example.
If Apple's 'game' is to make a niche device with no important apps and about 5,000 MAUs then they're playing it great.
Its clearly not a popular product and not for lack exposure.
It’s clearly not “popular” but the statement was that it’s not good. That’s wrong — it is a very good product.
Good means fit for purpose and a product your CEO pitched from the cover of Vanity Fair magazine and devoted half of his massive store real estate and staff to making successful that sells only about 350K units in the first year and projected to sell only about 150K units in its second year because even the huge number of in-store demos couldn't convince people to put PCs on their faces, is clearly not fit for purpose. If it was truly the future of PCs today as Tim Cook told us, it would not have flopped but the form factor and resulting ergonomics make it useful for little more than novelty experiences for a few nerds with more cash than most.
There are many definitions of “good.” But at the most fundamental, it is an amazing VR device. It excels for watching movies — the video quality is simply stunning. The immersive experiences from Apple are also jaw-dropping. So in terms of what the device IS, it’s a good product.
Is that good enough to break into mass appeal? Evidence says No
I had the HTC Vive quite a few years ago, using it a lot and constantly buying new games and experiences to try it out. It was a little annoying paying full whack for little 5-10min tech demos but was still encapsulated by it. Eventually got the wireless extension to avoid having to detangle the rope of a cable you were tethered to, but the base stations in the corner of the room were still annoying me cause you constantly had to re-calibrate it everytime someone nudged or moved them.
Left it for quite a few years and after seeing the reviews about the Quest 3, I bought that and was amazed by how simple it was to pickup and use and the fact that you didn't need a monster computer running it. You literally pick it up and get going. The Meta app store is filled with lots of VR Titles which aren't just tech demos and you can STILL hook it up to your computer and play a host of Steam games. The Quest 3 was like €500 and basically a full platform.
The Vision Pro got announced with a few improvements like higher resolution but it was an insane €3500... ok I was curious how much better it would be, since I was quite impressed by my Quest 3.
My friend had bought one, one of those people who loves to wear expensive watches and be seen in public having a lot of money. As with a lot of Apple products it's sometimes about being seen to have the latest thing and the Vision Pro was great for sitting in public, catching attention and showing people that you can afford a €3500 device.
He brings it on holiday and is passing it around the room, showing people the dinosaur tech demo and everyone is amazed at how brilliant it is. For all of those in amazement (including my friend) it was their very first experience getting into VR and I also went through the same feeling when I first got the HTC Vive.
He gives it to me and shows me the dinosaur tech demo and all I could really think was... how does this thing cost €3000 more than the Quest 3? I asked him: Where are the games? there are none. Can you hook it up to Steam? No... When the battery dies, can you swap it with another? No.
Unless I had bought my Quest 3 to compare them side-by-side I honestly could not feel that it was much better visually... the finger tracking to go through menus wasn't bad, but that was it.
I think the fact that Apple devices are generally in the thousands already: MBP can be like £3000, iPhone can be like £1k... it makes sense that they were able to sell them for the price of what they did, but for me it's just insanity.
Do they have a library of games yet? Do they have any VR Games yet? Someone said it wasn't priced for consumers and I guess that's fine, but again... why wouldn't you just buy a Quest 3 (unless you hate Facebook)?
what about the non-entertainment factor? i.e. using Quest 3 or AVP to replace the monitor for development work?
you can't really use them for long durations of time because your face gets hot and sweaty, from my experience. It doesn't feel good to have something stuck to your face.
Also, the resolution still isn't good enough to see small text IMO.
>progress in display technology will enable Apple to build a more attractive consumer product, in the form of light, comfortable and unobtrusive AR glasses.
Except the Vision Pro displays have zero to do with the technology they'll use in spectacles. Spectacles are an entirely different tech stack. See the Orion demo for an example and you'll see that 100% of the R&D spent on goggles is tossed on the bonfire when considering spectacles.
Both users of visionOS are happy about this announcement.
This is sad but true.
I was so excited about the Vision and desperate to get one.
Finally my company has bought one for testing and I’m honestly not sure what to even use it for.
Maybe a big screen Mac? Is that it?
I think Apple has fallen into the same dead end they did with Apple TV: no controller = no games.
Both Apple TV and Vision Pro could have been filled with games from indie devs. But it’s impossible to play most games with a pinch or the worst TV control ever created.
I wonder how much of it can be blamed on the Vision Pro being nothing more than a big wobbly iPod Touch, instead of a real computer.
For me, a Vision Pro would have been fantastically useful if it was a little bit more like MacOS (or Android), and shipped with a native, real terminal that I could run things on. $3500 is suddenly a lot easier to swallow if I could think about it like 20 monitors to run terminals on.
The better analogy is that it's the Apple TV interface for your face. All the buttons are ginormous, the options are barebones, the information density is crap.
> I was so excited about the Vision and desperate to get one. Finally my company has bought one for testing and I’m honestly not sure what to even use it for.
This is the VR experience, yup :)
I'm not really sure why anyone would want to use an Apple TV for games, instead of a dedicated console. AFAICT the killer app for Apple TV is airplay. I haven't seen a co-working space conference room TV without an Apple TV attached for years.
I mean, I guess privacy is the other feature. I use an AppleTV at home to bypass all the smart TV nonsense. I know Apple can't be trusted, but I trust it more than a TV manufacturer who tries to shove ads down my throat the moment I connect their TV to the internet.
I refuse to use anything Apple so can't speak for the Apple TV, but I see it as pretty comparable to the Google TV (aka Chromecast w/ Google TV) products, just more open, flexible, compatible, and affordable.
I use Google TV for games on occasion. It has excellent controller support and works great for lightweight games that run fine on the stick. For anything heavier, the Steam Link app is the go-to. I can run the games on my bigass Linux PC and stream them to the TV. I routinely do this for Hogwart's Legacy for example.
Now that said, lately I've been just hooking up my Steam Deck to the TV and using that. Less friction and less bugs by avoiding the Steam Link app. And the Steam Deck is pretty close to a console (certainly much closer than it is to an Apple/Google TV), so perhaps I've just proven your point :-D
> Both Apple TV and Vision Pro could have been filled with games from indie devs.
Panic, with its minuscule staff, has a more active store than either tvOS or visionOS with the Playdate. It's ridiculous.
Pretty much:
- big screen mac
- 3d movie viewing (the experience is actually mind-blowing)
> no controller = no games.
Bundling a controller would increase the cost for everyone to satisfy a minority of gamers.
So instead they support all PS5, Xbox, BT etc controllers.
> Bundling a controller would increase the cost for everyone to satisfy a minority of gamers.
Apple doesn't have to increase the cost. The leaked BOM suggests that Apple makes a sizable margin on Vision Pro, even if each controller cost $500 they could give them away in-box and still make more money per-unit than the Quest headset. It's not about cost.
> So instead they support all PS5, Xbox, BT etc controllers.
Those are not 6DOF controllers, they are class-compliant USB devices that every single computer really ought to support. If Apple supported OpenXR then they would likely also have the software to support other controllers, but apparently that's a touchy subject in this thread.
Apple probably "makes money" on each unit, but I would imagine the development costs of the Vision Pro were astronomical. With that in mind they might not even be recuperating the costs with their sizable margin.
Those aren’t VR controllers and no one is using them.
I use gamepads in VR all the time, fewer things to charge and less fatigue
It’s nice to see this addition. I’m not sure if Godot would be better off bridging OpenXR to apple’s ar compositer or do as these PRs implement.
It isn’t much work to bridge from a metal renderer to the ar compositor. There are nice, if under documented c apis for Compositor Services in visionOS. I don’t think this will end up being a heavy maintenance burden, but they should donate some headsets as the second vertex amplification doesn’t run in the simulator. The max threads per thread group also differ. So real hardware is needed to measure performance.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/compositorservices...
> they should donate some headsets
profiting 180 billion USD per year should put them in a position to also provide grants for hiring workforce for the necessary amount of years that will take to popularize their current and new AR/VR technology (if it'll ever be popular)
even if Godot starts also being the backend for non-gaming applications (which i don't know how the discussion about this went/is going), which AVP could also benefit, i doubt the investement of time to maintain this PR will pay itself, i.e. the few developers releasing software for Apple VR will make enough money and will donate enough for covering maintainer(s) to keep up with a (so far niche) new OS in Godot!
Interesting piece from Ben Thomson regarding Apple’s troubles in AI. He says this of Vision Pro:
https://stratechery.com/2025/apple-and-the-ghosts-of-compani...
“We already established above that the next paradigm is wearables. Wearables today, however, are very much in the pre-iPhone era. On one hand you have standalone platforms like Oculus, with its own operating system, app store, etc.; the best analogy is a video game console, which is technically a computer, but is not commonly thought of as such given its singular purpose. On the other hand, you have devices like smart watches, AirPods, and smart glasses, which are extensions of the phone; the analogy here is the iPod, which provided great functionality but was not a general computing device.
Now Apple might dispute this characterization in terms of the Vision Pro specifically, which not only has a PC-class M2 chip, along with its own visionOS operating system and apps, but can also run iPad apps. In truth, though, this makes the Vision Pro akin to Microsoft Mobile: yes, it is a capable device, but it is stuck in the wrong paradigm, i.e. the previous one that Apple dominated. Or, to put it another way, I don’t view “apps” as the bridge between mobile and wearables; apps are just the way we access the Internet on mobile, and the Internet was the old bridge, not the new one.”
Insane that Apple put this PR up without at all contributing to the development fund.
Didn't even put up an issue first haha.
If they did the work, what’s wrong with that?
Maintainers have to review the PR, answer Apple's "Open Questions", and support their users who want to build with the new functionality long term.
Laughably, it looks like the PR didn't even compile...[1]
> When you try and bundle, it will fail. The library paths are incorrect.
[1]: https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/105628#pullrequest...
Apple really are not sending their finest.
There's more to development than just code. I'm sure the Godot developers value the contribution and will try to make the most of it, but they got zero input into how to implement it and this PR contains a lot of issues (e.g. it does some API breaking changes that can't just be done as-is.) On top of that, they have no idea (from the outset, I mean: obviously they are communicating now) if Apple intends to continue maintaining this code in the long run or if they just want to put the minimum amount of effort into shipping it and then consider that box checked, shifting the maintenance burden to volunteers. I don't think there needs to be intentional malice, even very nice gestures can work out poorly; we almost lost the Linux NTFS3 driver because Paragon initially stopped maintaining it and nobody else stepped up.
I think Apple can do good here but they should definitely communicate better. For open source, early and often is a good idea. (Though also good to follow through... I have been guilty of many licked cookies purely by accident and poor focus.)
Are they going to do the ongoing maintenance if this is merged in?
Looks like it would be in their interest to do so, so yeah I don’t see why not.
There are many things that would be in Apple's interest to do, but they aren't so that's a complete non-argument.
I think it's a very valid question to ask, as many open source projects I've seen in the past that had to interface with Apple on the developer tooling front had to go through constant pain, as Apple isn't willing to e.g. provide references for certain .plist files, forcing many project to try and reverse-engineer what they do. More precisely there are usually people inside Apple willing to do that, but incapable to do that due to internal structures that result in a lack of clearly defined ownership.
So given that, I would say that if/once the original contributor of this PR moves on(/is made to move on) from that project, there is a good chance that this would also mark the end of cooperation from Apple's side.
This question is asked and answered in the linked PR thread.
If you are talking about this link [0], the person answering is from the Godot team and not Apple.
[0] https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/105628#issuecommen...
Reading a lot of comments it sounds like Apple should:
1. Give Godot some money.
2. Implement visionOS support via an extension not directly into core OR conform to industry standard OpenXR.
The people making the latter comments are ignoring the contents of this PR however, and showing a lack of understanding of the engine itself in the process.
You cannot build this as an extension. It’s a different OS and Godot needs it to be done this way, as many people in the PR have commented as well. An extension would not cover it, and people suggesting that are probably used to the PC VR development model where VR is an extension of an existing supported platform, not a platform in and off itself.
Beyond that, even if Apple supported OpenXR, you’d still need this PR first because it’s covering build support first. It doesn’t cover any of the XR/Spatial rendering elements.
> VR development model where VR is an extension of an existing supported platform, not a platform in and off itself
This is the crux of the issue, both for Apple and for Godot.
In Apple’s case, they’re finding that their vision does not resonate with consumers or developers. So they’re searching for ways to expand chances of success but not entering with an equal partnership mentality. Thats their prerogative but I would argue the arrogance blinds them to reality.
From Godot’s perspective, the question is whether all this distraction is worth it for a platform that has for all intents and purposes failed to prove itself. There’s an opportunity cost and likely constraints that would flow from supporting Apple’s divergent and unproven vision.
In my books it seems clear that it would be a mistake for Godot to invest energy in supporting a niche, heretofore unsuccessful product that is not aligned with Godot’s technical and product roadmap.
I still don’t understand why I see people saying Vision is an unsuccessful and failed platform.
Vision Pro is very clearly an early adopter version of a platform that has yet to truly get started. Obviously, a huge $3500 headset on your head is not the actual intended final form of this platform. The actual intended final form is glasses.
And until those glasses are out you can’t say it failed, because it hasn’t even started yet.
Because the rumor mill loves to churn things up, and people forget the past.
The original iPod was an incredibly niche product. It required a Mac at a time when Macs were way less common than they are now. When Windows support was added, it required FireWire, which was quite uncommon.
The original iPhone did OK but didn't sell super well. It was very expensive, had only 2G connectivity when 3G had already arrived, only worked on the #3 cellular carrier, and didn't support any third-party apps.
The original Apple Watch was bulky and severely underpowered.
Apple continued to iterate on all of these and they ended up being quite successful.
That's not to say Vision Pro will see the same treatment. There are plenty of failed products you can point to as well. Just that an iffy initial release doesn't mean anything about the long-term outlook for the product.
The iPod did have demand, though. It was huge, clunky, somewhat fragile, but people wanted to use one and carry it with them everywhere. Same goes for the iPhone, to some extent. They succeeded as lifestyle products because they were desirable and made life better.
But the Vision Pro? If you sold them at a flat-rate price of $1,000, I don't think I know people that would want to use one regularly. I don't even know anyone who would regularly use one if they got it for free. It's not going to replace the time they spend on their phone or Xbox, and it's probably not going to carve out any new routines so you can watch immersive video. It's competing against your phone and TV for YouTube privileges, and it's going to lose most of the time.
If Vision Pro was desirable to the average person, I might have hope for the product line as a whole. People don't want this from Apple though, it might as well be the spiritual successor to the Pippin.
Anybody I’ve ever demoed this product to has the opposite impression: it would replace their iPad and their TV easily if they could afford it and it was a bit lighter. I play Xbox and PS5 in it all the time ; it isn’t a rival to those products. It’s a preview of the future of all computing.
AFAIK Apple does not allow applications to render traditionally nor gives them access to the camera or other interesting effects.
You are instead given a DOM (really imagine idiosyncratic SVG for 3D) API and you must facade it to your engine object model.
Apple has forced library developers into a situation even worse than Metal: a single, idiosyncratic scene graph like API. None of the performance benefits of using the technology natively. None of the DX benefits of single code, run anywhere, since everything has to be aware of the spatial rendering limitations. It’s like Negative React Native: they had you a weird React that’s non native, and you must wrap it.
Truly, and I have no hesitation here because I will never want to work for Apple and they’re going downhill: this PR has its head so far up its butt.
Maybe this employee should have spent all this time convincing Apple to give developers access to the GPU.
Your comment is highly incorrect
You can render traditionally all you want with metal. You just don’t get some of the features like camera access, or gaze. Which does have its downsides, but is a long way from what you’re describing. I’ve ported a metal based renderer to visionOS for companies already, and you already have engines like Unreal supporting it too.
I’m not even sure what DOM you’re talking about. SwiftUI? RealityKit? The former is for Ui. The latter is an ECS like rendering engine. But neither fit what you describe.
Perhaps before being outraged by things you should be familiar with development on them first.
It's true, I stopped paying attention to the AVP after I returned it.
At the time it was released, which is not that long ago, AVP didn't support what I see is now called "mixed immersion mode." Unity's rendering was built upon the cockamamie scheme Apple had at launch and is the one I was describing in my comment, which is all I was familiar with.
Broadly speaking, you caught me, I don't stay up to date about stuff where everyone knows ahead of time that there is no audience. That's not your fault or my fault, it's Apple's fault.
>You cannot build this as an extension. It’s a different OS and Godot needs it to be done this way,
How does support for platforms like the nintendo switch work?
Godot outline it here https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/platform/co...
But there are essentially third party forks of the engine with platform support added in.
This is surprising. From everything I've been hearing in the media, I got the impression Apple had mostly given up on their XR products and will keep them on life-support until the technology is ready for mass consumption.
The media loves to spin Apple things as failures right up until the point when they’re a success. See coverage of iPhone, Apple Pay, iPad, etc. Even “Apple faithful” media like MacRumors.com will be measured but pessimistic about Apple’s new efforts because negativity drives clicks more than positivity across the board.
I don't think this is an Apple-exclusive phenomenon. Even if it was, the media would be pretty well-justified in reporting on a lifestyle product with diminished demand. I remember similar news coverage for the PS3, Shamwow, Google Glass, Juicero, Zune, Fire Phone, and so much more.
It feels more like Apple users aren't used to acknowledging Apple's own failures. Because Apple refuses to admit certain products don't succeed (see: iPhone Mini, 12" Macbook, Butterfly Keyboard), their users come to believe that Apple is beyond reproach. If Vision Pro was good enough for the public, it's genuinely hard to imagine how much worse the Apple Car and Airpower could be.
Agree this isn’t Apple exclusive. Mostly what I mean to say is that media tends to portray things as DOOMED if they aren’t amazingly successful right out of the gate. The Vision Pro v1 is not a great product but it’s also a super niche product given the price so expectations of 20M units are far fetched to begin with. It’s more of a Mac Pro tier product than a MacBook Pro 16 or a MacBook Air product, much less an iPad or iPhone type product in terms of addressed market. But I don’t think this means the product is an abject failure that should be cancelled and written off as a sunk cost / dead end.
Apple sold ~17M iPhones in its first 2 years, ~20M Apple Watches in the same timeframe, and ~370K Vision Pros in its first year from a production run of ~500K. No further Vision Pro v1 production is planned, with remaining units allocated for second-year (2025) demand.
Vision Pro is an absolute flop compared to even the "everyone said it would fail the first year" products that went on to success. 500K units across 2 years when the presumed Watch sold 20M in the same timeframe and fanboys are still telling us "you're saying the same thing about AVP as you did iPhone and Watch when they first came out." Maybe so, but Vision Pro is orders of magnitude worse off out of the gate than those other products and Apple's already moved the top AVP talent to Siri, spectacles, and other projects so it's pretty clear Apple agrees it's not going to be a success.
They've mostly given up on the goggles form factor, though the winding down will probably be over the next couple of years. That technology will never be ready so they're moving on to entirely new technologies for far less capable spectacles that will be more like Apple Watch for your eyes, a heads up display much like your car's.
Until things are officially announced they could change at any moment. Rumor mills are rarely productive.
Those who know can't say, and those who say don't know. This isn't universally true, but accurate info from Apple is hard to come by, and it gets harder the farther out you're looking. People outside Apple, and most people inside Apple, don't know where things stand with the Vision product line.
Actively working on Vision Pro 2:
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/04/13/vision-pro-2-two-rumore...
Apple should flick Godot a chunk of change to properly get this rolling.
What Apple should do is drive a truckload of money on Valve's doorstep and get a Proton-like system built for M-series Macs.
They have done that.
They gave some cash money to CodeWeavers, the company that created wine. It's called the Game Porting Toolkit: https://developer.apple.com/games/game-porting-toolkit/
That's the problem I think: porting.
As I understand things, proton allows windows games to just work (pun intended) on Linux. No porting, no rebuild - just download and run.
Who is going to bother doing all the extra work to port their game for Mac?! Time and time again there have been loads of articles on here over the years with developers saying it is simply not worth the hassle to support Linux and Mac.
The downside of relying on translation layers rather than porting from the perspective of Apple is likely that they vey much detest the lack of control that would result from that. Game devs targeting Linux have started viewing Proton/Windows runtime as a target, which has lead to native Linux ports becoming less common. As a person wanting to play the odd game on Linux, this has been a godsend, but for Apple, this would be viewed as an existential threat.
Personally, I'd wish for more extensive Vulkan support, but I have been informed that this is likely not as easily done considering Apples GPUs with TBDR differ somewhat from the industry standard.
At the end though, if Apple truly wanted, they could simply spent money on studios and incentives ports. None-Mobile-Gaming remains no priority for them, simple as that. I haven't seen any indication that the AVP has changed that in any way and I wouldn't be surprised if they view GoDot not as a game engine, but rather another way to create experiences.
The same folks that bother for iOS and iPad games, Nintendo Switch and PlayStation.
Most studios aren't religious about APIs like FOSS developers, they create API agnostic engines with plugabble backends and move on with what is relevant for their game IP.
It has been like this since the dawn of computer games being fully written in Assembly across 8 bit snowflakes.
>Who is going to bother doing all the extra work to port their game for Mac?!
So far at least Ubisoft, CAPCOM, Remedy, Kojima Productions and Hello Games.
And for additional context, when it comes to Vision Pro, Ubisoft has one game that is designed with it in mind (Rabbids: Legends of the Multiverse) and CAPCOM has none.
That should tell us something about the appetite to support visionOS.
Most companies don't support visionOS because it is a 3000 euros/dollar device, that really has to sell a lot of games.
Additionally many developers are not porting their games to visionOS as protest to existing store percentages, nothing to do with Metal support.
Exactly the same thing happened with iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and Apple Watch.
It's Vision Pro 1. Maybe let's see how the next revision goes first.
Despite the name, the GPTK isn't just a porting toolkit. It contains a version of Wine that is specifically patched to pass DirectX calls to Metal.
There is a relatively easy way for a player to use GPTK to run games from their Steam library on Mac.
Here is how to use Apple's Game Porting Toolkit to install Wine & Steam.
1. Go to https://github.com/installaware/AGPT and download & run the installer
2. Go to https://store.steampowered.com/about/ and download the installer
3. Open a Terminal, run mkdir Games && gameportingtoolkit ~/Games Downloads/SteamSetup.exe
4. Follow the instructions at https://www.applegamingwiki.com/wiki/Game_Porting_Toolkit#Sh...
(There's also Mythic, which I forgot the name of https://getmythic.app/)
As far as I know, CodeWeavers was not involved in that project:
> We did not work with Apple on this tool
https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/mjohnson/2023/6/6/wine-come...
They have not done that, though. With Proton, almost every Windows game on Steam "Just Works" (and many others do with a small amount of configuration.)
As far as I can tell, there is no way for a player to use GPT to run games from their Steam library on Mac.
Proton is so good that devs have dropped Linux builds for their games because Proton runs the Windows version faster - emulated.
Yeah I don’t get it either. A drive-by PR without even offering hardware for testing? The entitlement around OSS these days… One of the richest companies in the world, and then ”but open source should benefit everyone, it’s discrimination if you single out trillion dollar corporations”. Dude..
Jeez, some people are just insufferable
I'm glad some people like https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/105628#issuecommen... exists
"why this is not an extension" sounds like an awfully naive question. I'm not a Godot expert but I'd bet a very large amount of money that this is not in the realm of a simple extension, as flexible as Godot can be (and a check of the PR seems to confirm this)
With Godot, you can’t make sweeping platform changes—especially adding a new one—as an extension. This is the only path besides Apple forking Godot, which would be unworkable in the long run and obviously undesirable for both parties.
I kind of expected him to be in there, but it was a nice surprise seeing Miguel de Icaza (guy who's the reason unity uses c#) commenting on this addition, with his current work getting swift and godot to play nicely together as well as making xodot for iOS.
Kinda cool.
Meanwhile, Apple could garner way more sales if they simply put a video input on the Vision. Gamers, 3-D modelers, drone operators, cinematographers, people using computers in cramped spaces (AKA planes) would all be potential buyers.
But nope; Apple's fear of I/O cripples another product.
Looks like Apple might be prioritizing gaming for the next gen Vision devices? Hopefully, as I know many, myself included that passed on the Vision because the gaming support wasn't there. Price was never an issue.
This to me smells of desperation - not so much as "prioritising gaming" and more "prioritising anyone making any kind of content at all please please please someone make something for our device".
It no more smells of desperation than when Apple contributed modern ScreenCaptureKit support to OBS Studio. They want great experiences for their own platforms and sometimes that means reaching out to other projects.
It's true that the Vision Pro hasn't seen the uptake that Apple's other platforms did at launch, like the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, etc. — but it's nearsighted to think that Apple can't play a long game. It has the patience (and money) to play it all the way to the eventual release of their glasses; by that time, the platform will already have plenty of fantastic software ported from iOS and, eventually, other platforms through ventures like this.
I think there is "playing the long game" and there is "flogging a dead horse".
I still can't believe that both apple and meta bet the farm on VR and screwed up so spectacularly. It was fairly clear that VR was never going to be mainstream for the same reasons that 3D movies and TVs vanished after all that fanfare and marketing a few years ago: people don't want to wear the glasses, and they don't want to pay extra either. We've been there and tried this - people are happy with 2D screens and don't see any real benefits of 3D glasses/headsets worth paying for (...apart from the nerdfactor).
Sure there might be some sort of market for "smart glasses" and people are continually releasing various iterations of those (and I'd be up for a pair too FWIW), but if the vision pro is any indication of what the tech is capable of today, we're a very very long way away from normal-glasses-style form factor units (i.e. size, weight, battery life, discreetness, price, nausea etc).
Tl;Dr - nice try doing something new, but if I were an apple investor I'd prefer they went back to what they knew and not waste further billions upon billions "playing the long game" on a dead-end because they can't accept they made a mistake.
> flogging a dead horse
It's the first version of their XR device.
I still own the first iPod, iPhone and Apple Watch and remember people saying that each one would be failures.
500$ is a toy most upper middle class families can afford. That's the Meta Quest 3.
3500$ will even have someone making 200k plus pause to think if they really need it.
Not to mention the Vision Pro looks much more fragile. Looks like it'll slip off my face and shatter.
I'm cool with wasting $500, but I could do a lot of things of $3,500.That's a round trip flight to Thailand and a nice hotel room, you might be able to fit in a trip to Paris too.
I think we’ve forgotten over the years just how expensive tech can be. The original iMac was 1299 at launch, inflation adjusted that’s $2500 today, for what even at the time was considered a cut down machine. The iBook would launch the next year for $1599, or about $3k today. Is the AVP at least as interesting of a product to buyers as the original iMac or iBook was in 1998? Bear in mind 1998 Apple was just barely holding on after years of mismanagement, still was running Mac OS 8 and neither the iPod juggernaut nor OSX were anywhere on the horizon for people to suspect that Apple would even still be in business or supporting their proprietary computers in a few years.
Perhaps more apt, the original Macintosh released at $2495, or a whopping $7,500 inflation adjusted. Now I’m not thinking that the AVP is necessarily going to change the computing world the way the Macintosh did, but surely its novelty and potential fits somewhere between an iMac and an original Macintosh right?
It's the Vision Pro: for professionals not middle class families.
Apple has every intention of releasing a lower cost version for people like you.
So instead of building for a platform that has a low barrier of entry and millions upon millions of users, developers should spend time in Apple’s expense plantation.
All in the hopes of sharecropping on the Vision Store.
Honestly I want an open source headset I can run my own code on , that’s what I’m waiting for
You can run your own code on the VisionOS.
And it's weird to call it sharecropping when developers are simply trying to get paid for their hard work.
The only way to officially distribute apps for iOS devices is via the App Store, giving 30% off top to Apple. If that's not sharecropping I don't know what is
Does anyone in the industry care about VR gaming right now?
I don't see people buying headsets, I don't see VR features in new major games, it's just not a thing outside of a probably shrinking niche.
You’re not looking very hard then because there are loads of new games released both with VR support and also exclusively for devices like the Oculus Quest.
What we’ve seen less of is AAA games bolt on VR support as an afterthought - and the reason for that is because it’s almost always a terrible way to play a game that was originally designed to be played with a keyboard and mouse, or traditional game controller.
Lookup GorillaTag a surprise smash hit that made half $1 billion(!) revenue on the Meta quest!
That is a good example of a good and successful VR game, but it's also three years old.
It would be strange if they went about it this way, as it gives the godot community some unprecedented control over apple's release schedule
My fear is that they won't treat godot first class and release updates for unity first. That kind of first class support would be required for me to switch from unity.
The interesting thing here is that Apple finally learned that games matter. Of course they go about it in the same "we're never wrong" attitude by never admitting it, like how their mice don't have two physical buttons to stay true to "a mouse should have one button" from the original Mac. They're learning though, it was voluntary unlike USB-C on their phones/tablets.
I think that when Apple pivoted to "Apple Silicon" or basically the M series chips they realized that they should pivot to video games also. Once iOS supported an App Store it came out of the gates organically with people making video games for the platform . Unfortunately they never really followed through with helping game developers or any meaningful QC regarding monetization so you have a lot of good games and a whole lot of bad games. Also, Warframe when they made a switch port they figured out they could make an iOS port which really caught on in Japan.
There are exactly zero people in the video game industry working on speculative AVP games. The ones who are thinking about it are not hesitating due to Godot support.
That's the situation now. It will be different when Godot is supported and the Apple Vision Air is released. Then anyone making VR games/apps will have a new target using standard (though less popular than Unity/UE5) development tooling. It will self-select those who find this reasonable.
Apple Vision Air will be a fart in the wind.
There are 1/10th-1/100th as many Godot developers as Unity and Unreal developers. If there are no games now, there won't be with Godot support. That said I want Godot AVP support to succeed, but there are other problems all in Apple's court.
Back in the day when Microsoft dominated everything, we would have said embrace, extend, extinguish.
VisionOS doesn't dominate anything.
There is nothing going on here but embracing. When Microsoft did it, they forked a project and added their own features to their private fork, intending to replace the original. Apple is directly contributing code to the source project here.
Even if Apple was somehow harming and attempting to subsume Godot in this situation, what would the end game be? What would managing a game engine descended from Godot do for them?
Good on Apple.
Shiny. Unsolicited advice. visionOS is a distraction for the Godot team (whether or not you believe visionOS is a dead end or not). I would recommend focusing on high impact domains while Godot competitors like Unreal and Unity diffuse their attention.
If you officially support visionOS, it now requires all product and engineering innovation to take it into account, slowing down velocity for very little gain, if any.
It looks like Apple put their own people on this one.
If they want to maintain this, the Godot foundation needs to be extremely clear about that. You're talking about an extremely niche platform that will require tons of ongoing maintenance.
I would have hoped Apple also spent time working on the general engine and maybe tackling some bugs. Maybe they did maybe they didn't.
And since Apple is here, please help adding support for Apple TV. Apple and Android TV support sometimes makes the difference when choosing an engine.
Apple TV for games is super niche, with very little market share in the big scheme of things.
Even when it comes to TV, Apple realized they had to create an Apple TV+ app for other platforms to extend the reach of their investment in shows/movies beyond their own hardware.
I think these connected to TV devices are a wasted opportunity for gaming. They are great for family type video games and with some marketing from apple or Google they could sell tons of games. I happily paid for Beach Buggy, a Mario Kart type game, my kids are loving it and I think that the company makes a lot of money from this game alone.
But the support from Google is abysmal. No search functionality, developer hostility when trying to publish something etc.
There are however some games which thrive on apple tv. The virtual cycling game zwift is probably one of the most important apple tv games, it's the recommended system to get the game running on the cheap.
So, if you're making an app that benefits from a big screen and your customers are willing to buy a cheap dedicated device to easily use your app on a big screen, supporting apple tv might be a very sensible choice.
> if you're making an app that benefits from a big screen and your customers are willing to buy a cheap dedicated device to easily use your app on a big screen, supporting apple tv might be a very sensible choice.
Compared to other HDMI-connected devices (e.g. Google Streamer fka ChromeCast, Amazon FireTV, Roku) or major TV platforms like Android TV or Samsung and LG, the market share that Apple TV commands is dwarfed. Apple TV devices are also very expensive.
A startup like Zwift that bets on Apple TV as a key GTM strategy is making an error in judgment. Apple TV is extreme long tail footprint.
AppleTV is much more similar to a game console than the mentioned devices. It has a small set of powerful CPU/GPU/memory combos vs the menagerie of disparate and mostly much lower power hardware under the broad tent of “Google related tv platform” stuff.
Meh, I'd say it's a cheap addition when you already have to support iOS and iPadOS devices. Also market share is secondary if people are willing to buy it as a dedicated device and it is cheap (130$) when talking about people's expenditures for this hobby.
But yeah, I'm not an Insider and I'd love to know why they're supporting the apple tv but don't offer the Android App on the Google tv platform. Maybe something about non universal remote inputs or the wildly varying hw capabilities leading to support nightmares (but that's always an issue on Android).
> cheap addition when you already have to support iOS and iPadOS devices.
Presentation form factor and input modality is different on LRUD compared to touch, 10’ vs handheld.
There’s an opportunity cost: it is better to improve the user experience on the vast majority of TV devices (eg Samsung or Android TV or Fire tv) than it is to support a tiny market share device like Apple TV that you now also need to keep up to date.
arent all apps just expo react webui wrappers nowadays?
We are specifically talking about 3D games here.
three.js then?
godot seems cool, would love to get some vision lite dev kit in a few years to play with
> Apple TV for games is super niche
Order(s) of magnitude less niche than Apple Vision.
If you want your game picked up for Apple Arcade ($$$), you need to support Apple TV.
If they could just let Geforce Now (NVIDIA Cloud gaming platform) ship a native app I would use my Apple TV much more. But no, they prefer to be extremely hostile to users over some app store bs.
You can still use moonlight.
> Apple TV for games is super niche,
Apple TV is just a tale of so many missed opportunities.
They already said they plan to do this in the PR.
One of the comments says another team is working on Apple TV.
Even debating support for a niche platform is a distraction. Noise.
Niche platform from one of the biggest companies on the planet isn’t as niche as others though. If there’s a way to get first party support from the vendor directly it could be beneficial to the other platforms too (iOS).
> it could be beneficial to the other platforms too (iOS).
In what way?
As far as I know, iOS support on Godot is almost entirely community-driven. If true, Godot has nothing to gain. Apple is struggling with adoption so they have most to gain from Godot support for visionOS, but is not obvious that visionOS support would benefit Godot in any strategic manner.
One strategic heuristic is that you don’t want to undertake the work to enable another company’s success on a product line, unless you depend on it or believe you have a strategic advantage against other competitors.
For example, if Godot negotiates for exclusivity or primary status for game engine positioning on visionOS and they believe VR is a material future footprint, that might be interesting. Anything less is in Apple’s favor and not in Godot’s.
>As far as I know, iOS support on Godot is almost entirely community-driven.
Yes, and now it has gotten to the point where it clearly has been noticed by Apple; and they're eager to contribute back to it too.
Is that not... the ideal scenario here? You have community contribute a port for a big platform, the company notices, and starts contributing too.
> Apple; and they're eager to contribute back to it too.
To think Apple is interested in the success of Godot would be a mistake. It might feel like a compliment, but it would be a trap because Apple’s interest stems from increasing the chances of visionOS success and will be happy to externalize the ongoing maintenance tax to Godot.
Unless Godot feels they need visionOS then it isn’t in their interest to entertain Apple’s PR. If anything they should respond saying they already support standard interface in the form of OpenXR.
Did you get burned by a company contributing to an open source project before or what makes you so cynical about this PR? I feel like it's the ideal scenario that a company actually dedicates engineers and time to contribute to an open source project instead of doing their own thing, maybe even behind closed doors.
I’m invested in the success of Godot and fear the visionOS distraction dilutes the urgency that’s needed to compete with Unreal and Unity.
Additionally, if Godot accepts this PR and related ongoing work, it would signal to me poor strategic judgment.
Many an open source project progress slows down under the burden of supporting immaterial platforms.
Have you contributed to Godot yourself or made something of note with it? Multiple developers are actively asking for visionOS support as people on the Godot team have mentioned. Why should your distaste for a platform preclude them from having platform support that would benefit the things they want to build?
Beyond that, have you even looked at the PR here to see what your supposed distraction would be? Most of the PR is shared infrastructure between the Apple embedded platforms.
> Why should your distaste for a platform preclude them from having platform support that would benefit the things they want to build?
They answered this in their initial comment:
> If you officially support visionOS, it now requires all product and engineering innovation to take it into account, slowing down velocity for very little gain, if any.
That’s not really an answer though, anymore than any other platform. I’m not asking why they don’t want it supported, I’m asking why their distaste should overrule everyone else who does.
Just because this one very angry person doesn’t want this platform supported, doesn’t mean others don’t. You could argue the exact same thing in reverse for any other platform that is niche for someone else.
Apple would need to make an ongoing commitment.
Either monetarily, or with personnel. What I would have really liked to see is for them to not only fix issues relating to their own products, but to help Godot as a whole. Maybe, even add Swift as a scripting option without a hard requirement of owning a Mac.
This looks like a one time "gift" of high maintenance code. It's not like when Microsoft assisted with C# support. I don't need to buy a Windows PC or a $3500 Microsoft headset to make use of that.
It's also really rude to just open a giant PR without a discussion first.
> It's also really rude to just open a giant PR without a discussion first.
Would you mind explaining why you feel that way?
I understand being cautious about accepting the PR, but can’t say I quite understand why submitting it would be rude
It’s now implied that the community needs to maintain this thing.
Apple should of made it clear what they want to do, and an ongoing commitment of any before opening the PR.
Yes
I'll leave this decision to the Godot maintainers but as an outside that only read the PR and comments it seems plausible that it's also in Apples favor to fix issues in the shared iOS / visionOS codebase that they are using, especially if they might come from Apple APIs that could be improved on their side too.
exclusivity ?? its an open source project why would they want that, its not a competition :p
Godot is absolutely in competition with other game engines.
I don't know the Godot ppl, but I hang out on the LibGDX discord and what they want is to make a good engine for its own sake. If someone would be better served with Unity or Godot or anything else they're extremely quick to say so.
The point is to make the world better not for their own project to Win.
I'm assuming Godot is the same way, and the idea of spending effort making sure every other OSS engine doesn't have VisionOS support is a lil baffling
That's one of the things they are discussing in the comment chain. Apple hasn't directly addressed it yet. Seems like if they want this to be official, they ought to donate some headsets and money to offset the increased maintenance...
Apple has more to gain than does Godot. Money and headsets cannot faithfully account for additional complexity and coordination tax. Nevermind potential constraints on other platform expressions of the game engine.
What you want to do is first decide whether it is strategically valuable to be on this platform. If it is important, then you want to make sure there’s ROI in approach. Doing things in reverse, I.e. seeing whether there’s a cost-effective path to support another platform before deciding whether to support is is misguided in my opinion.
Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
TLDR; We hate Epic and Unreal, can we be friends pllleeeeaaassseeee.
Are there any apps from this project available in the visionos App Store yet?
The PR to add the basic infrastructure for engine-level support was posted yesterday. There hasn't been enough time for anything to pass through App Store review yet, let alone all the work that has to happen before that, like writing and releasing the rest of the engine support for visionOS, and writing an application to use it.
I simply figured the folks who created this would have actually ported an actual app while in development as part of the process.
Expecting a demo application as proof of concept would have been reasonable. Expecting a shipping product in the customer-facing app store is entirely different.
smh, game devs always with the excuses
where are the mythical 100x engineers when you need them most
Burned by Apple and boycotting this ;)
My guy it's not even merged yet
Godot is open source. I'm sure, at least internally, Apple has tested these changes on one or more 'demo' apps. Any of which could be released as public demos.
Yes, Apple is a company that is famously known for publicly releasing demos and proofs of concepts; especially around games.
If only had some sort of developer conference coming up in a little over a month. A conference where they release a bunch of demo and example projects. Well it's too bad no such thing exists.
It should probably be a plugin of some sort rather than built in the engine. It's a very small use case scenario and the devices are expensive and rare.
Like the comments said there are also concerns about maintaining it in the long term.
Having made games in Godot, I'm quite excited by the prospect of making the games within vision OS and playing them in a virtual 3D space. But Apple has only shown its vision for it and the future prospects are very uncertain due to the economic climate and affordability.
This is discussed in the PR comments - it's a separate OS and will necessitate changes to core.