Apple, Inc has joined the Blender Foundation’s Development Fund as a Patron Member, the organisation announced on Thursday.
The Blender Foundation, which develops and supports the massively popular open source 3D tool, said Apple’s financial contributions as a Patron Member will fund its core development initiatives.
Today Apple joins the Blender Foundation’s Development Fund as a corporate Patron member. Welcome! https://t.co/7jtN8yLuE6 #DevFund #b3d
— Blender (@Blender) October 14, 2021
The Cupertino-based tech firm will also provide engineering expertise and further resources to Blender and its global development community to back artists and developers for the platform.
The Foundation’s website shows current Patron Member heavyweights in the real-time 3D (RT3D) space such as Unity, AMD, Facebook, NVIDIA, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Epic Games.
Corporate Gold members such as Adobe, Microsoft, and Intel have also joined as contributers along with Embark, BlenderMarket, and BlenderKit.
The news comes as Apple has been developing its own mixed reality (MR) capabilities as it plans to launch an MR headset for the enterprise market in late-2022, and has filed several key patents for the headset to boost performance, facial tracking, and other technologies.
NVIDIA, one of Blender’s top-tier sponsors, announced plans in October to port its Blender user base to the company’s upcoming Omniverse project, backed by roughly 500 investing tech firms, to reposition the Santa Clara-based firm as a key Metaverse developer.
The plans came ahead of a breakthrough from researchers working jointly with the tech company, who revealed a new method to detect 3D spatial lighting, shapes, and reflections for 3D content.
Researchers from the University of Toronto, the Vector Institute, and NVIDIA proposed a Volumetric Spherical Gaussian representation, or voxel unit, to boost redering performance for 3D developers.
