iFixit breaks down Oculus Rift to reveal custom display and new lenses

March 31, 2016

There is little to no chance that you will open up your brand new Oculus Rift virtual reality headset that you spend $600 on. However, you might still be curious about what really is inside the headset. iFixit has you covered in that regard.

iFixit is a crowdsourced repair-guide sit. According to the website, the Oculus Rift is moderately easy to repair. The company posted its teardown of the head-mounted display from Facebook subsidiary Oculus VR, and its team found that the Rift is difficult to get inside of and it has a lot of ribbon cables that are easy to damage.

Despite these issues, iFixit still scored the Rift a 7 out of 10 for “repairability”, which is fairly decent. The website said this is because of the fact that it has efficient cable management and easily removable earpieces. We might be in the early age as far as virtual reality applications are concerned, however, according to analysts at tech advisor Digi-Capital, the market could go on to make $30 billion in revenues by 2020. iFixit has also revealed that Oculus has used years of knowledge from releasing development kits to deliver a device with a lot of smart design choices.

Moreover, iFixit has also revealed that Oculus has used years of knowledge from releasing development kits to deliver a device with a lot of smart design choices.

The teardown also cleared out one important thing, the VR doesn’t use the same display as that of the Samsung Galaxy S7. Instead, Rift features two custom displays that are 90mm diagonally each and with 456 pixels per inch. As iFixit points out, the display ppi is better than the 401 ppi of the iPhone 6S Plus, but it’s well below the Galaxy S7’s 576 ppi.

Finally, iFixit has posted a list of the chips that you’ll find inside of a Rift: