Apple And Valve Collaboration

We’ve heard rumors for a long time about the possibility of Apple building an augmented reality headset. The new iPhone 11 series, with its spatially aware U1 chip, is more compatible than ever for AR. And now, a Digitimes report states that Apple may collaborate with Valve to develop its AR headset.


Why is a Valve partnership supposedly so interesting? The reason for this is that Valve owns Steam, the world’s largest PC game distribution service. Valve has a virtual restraint of trade on PC game sales. He also developed his own virtual reality headset, the Steam Index.


Valve and Apple’s History AR / VR Collaboration
This will not be the first time Valve will collaborate with Apple in AR and VR arenas. In early 2017, a Valve collaboration brought virtual reality support for Mac Real Sierra in a very unique way. VR experiences demand high levels of GPU power: this is something that an integrated Mac GPU cannot provide. Instead, the solution leveraged Mac’s EGPU capabilities over Thunderbolt to make VR possible.


Digitimes reported on a possible partnership. This is what they said about it:


“Apple will do collaboration with Valve on AR headsets rather than VR devices, as its CEO Tim Cook believes AR can make the digital content part of the user’s world and be popular with consumers as smartphones. Apple to promote the AR software development by recruiting more engineers for graphic design all over the world, system interfaces and system architecture segments Sector is also encouraging. “


This report is in line with earlier predictions made by Apple analyst Ming Chu Kuo. Kuo reveals that HR was working with third parties to build and launch the device. They believe it will begin by 2020.


MacRumors uncovered evidences of the Apple AR headset. In an internal build of iOS 13, they got the option to enable a STARTest mode, which allows users to enable or disable head-mounted mode. This was found with several mentions in some iOS 13 code called “Garta”.


Amidst the persistent rumors and evidence found in the codebase of iOS 13, we think it is very likely that Apple will soon launch a product in the AR space. And this can be done together with Vel. Exactly what it will involve is still something that remains to be seen, though.