spatialcomputing.info

Last week Meta released the latest version of the Meta Quest Developer Hub tool which has been optimized to work natively on Apple’s M-series chips for better performance.

The Meta Quest Developer Hub (MQDH) is a collection of tools to make VR development easier for Quest developers. In addition to giving devs an easy way to manage their headset and the files on it, it also provides access to Meta’s various VR SDKs, and includes tools to profiling and optimizing VR applications.

While MQDH has supported MacOS since it launched back in late 2020, the latest version v3.2, is just now getting around to supporting Apple’s modern M-series chips which the company uses in all of its most recent computers. The tool now has native support for the ARM64 architecture of the M-series chips, improving booting time and performance.

It’s a somewhat curious update considering this is the only major change in MQDH v3.2, and considering that VR developers working on MacOS seem to be a tiny minority compared to those on Windows.

There’s no telling exactly why Meta chose to do this now—rather than say, months if not years ago. Possibilities range from the insignificant (perhaps a handful of Meta’s internal VR devs work on Mac and wanted the extra performance) to the strategic (maybe Meta wants to improve the experience of Mac VR developers in an attempt to sway them away from Apple’s long-rumored headset.