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.
1. Give Godot some money.
2. Implement visionOS support via an extension not directly into core OR conform to industry standard OpenXR.