I always wanted but never got a Virtual Boy, but I’m glad I waited since the Oculus Rift looks like a much better goggle-based gaming platform. The gadget got the teardown treatment over at iFixit today, thanks to a developer edition secured by the site. The Rift was remarkably easy to pull apart, earning it a very high repairability score. Rare for an iFixit teardown, the Oculus Rift one also includes some hands-on gameplay before the team pops the case.
iFixit offers a great video of the view from inside the Rift, showing exactly how it manages the 3D effect by offsetting the image slightly for each eye, which are then combined by your brain and give the illusion of depth. The rest of the teardown shows the Rift’s core parts, like the 1280×800 resolution LCD that outputs the 640×800 image to each eye, supplied by Taiwan’s Chimei Innolux. iFixit dubs this “good news,” as Chimei Innolux is Taiwan’s largest LCD supplier.
Other key components include the ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller with a 72MHz CPU (most processing is handled by the host computer, of course), and there are a variety of motion, acceleration and gyroscope sensors on board to help the device follow and compensate for changes in head movement.
The Oculus Rift was already one of the coolest, geekiest gadgets on the horizon, but now that it’s been pulled apart in a remarkably easy function to reveal its relatively simple, but very functional internals, I’m even more excited to get my hands on one.