For our first teardown of 2022, we’re looking into the past to get a glimpse of the future.
Welcome to the Oculus (aka Meta) Quest 2 teardown.
The end of 2021, moving into CES 2022, brought us a giant heap of metaverse-related content
and products.
And by most people’s interpretation, you can’t have the metaverse without some sort
of virtual reality … which brings us to this.
Facebook/Oculus/Meta’s 300 dollar cordless VR headset.
This was originally released in 2020, but we never got around to taking it apart.
What makes the Quest 2 special is that it does not require any cables or additional
hardware to work.
Where other headsets need a high-end PC, extra cameras to track your movements, and hours
of setup and calibration, all you need with the Quest 2 is this headset and these controllers.
And that is key to Meta’s gameplan to get everyone hooked on the metaverse.
They see this as the next smartphone boom, and to get people on board, this needs to
be simple and cheap.
Simple and cheap on the outside does not equal simple and cheap on the inside, though.
Crammed into this headset is basically a flagship 2020 smartphone, plus a bunch of extra cameras,
sensors, and other VR stuff.
To get started I’ll remove 6 T2 screws from under the foam padding on the dark side of
the headset.
That allows me to remove the plastic trim piece that goes around the lenses.
Then five more screws hold the face of the light side in place, and now we can get an
idea of how dense this thing is.
Every inch has been packed with something.
At this point I hope to see an easy way to remove the battery, or at least disconnect
it, but I’m not seeing anything.
Not being able to quickly replace the battery is a bummer, because, like everything else
with a battery, this will eventually need a replacement!
At least this will work while plugged in.
Thanks to this user-created guide on iFixit, I do actually know where the battery cable
is.
To disconnect the battery, I just have to remove these three screws and this metal bracket,
then disconnect this cable here.
After that, I’ll remove this big black antenna with 8 more phillips screws.
Then the fan, and this cute little heatsink.
Next I can start disconnecting cables and free the motherboard.
REmember, this thing is basically a smartphone.
Look how tiny this board is!
Chip id
Finally, i can pull the rest of this out of the white plastic housing.
The screen and eyepiece assembly holds onto those four cameras, and has a really interesting
adjustment mechanism for the IPD, or inter-pupillary distance adjustment.
Watch that tiny gear move as both eyepieces slide back and forth between their three positions.
I said it was interesting, but it’s definitely not precise.
This is no doubt one of the cost-saving measures that Oculus took, and though most people probably
won’t notice, I wasn’t able to get a perfect IPD adjustment, which led to this thing making
me feel nauseous after each session.
In the housing we have the two speakers, and it looks like they speak through this rotating
arm—we’ll have to check that out in a minute.
Then there’s the battery, stuck to the top of the headset with 6 phillips screws.
This is an awful lot of disassembly to get to a battery replacement, but at least it’s
not glued in place.
This __ wh cell should give you just over two hours of cordless VR gaming.
Not bad, again, considering all the different tech this little cell powers.
The speakers have a bracket screwed in around them, then some fiddly little metal clips.
Removing the two black plastic pieces lets you remove the whole speaker arm.
Building the speaker into the arm is a really clever design trick that allows them to make
the speakers bigger, and also get the sound closer to your ear for better immersion.
The lenses come off by siding out the adjustment rails.
These are fresnel lenses, which we’ve seen in several VR headsets.
The circles you see in the glass here achieve the magnification and immersion effects of
a thicker, heavier lens, without the weight or the bulk.
On our way to the screen I’m going to pull one of these cameras off.
That is quite a bit of thermal paste!
These cameras are running full time while you’re beat sabering, so no doubt they heat
up.
Speaking of the cameras, now that we’re most of the way through this thing let’s
talk about how Oculus built this headset to track movement without any external sensors.
This is the coolest part of this headset for me.
Devin Coldeway, a reporter at techcrunch, got a pretty straight answer from the CTO
of facebook a few years ago, which we’ll link in the description below.
Basically the answer boils down to three things:
they’re running the inertial measurement chip we saw on the main board at a very high
frequency (hence the thermal paste there), leaning heavily on Facebook (meta’s) machine
learning and computer vision algorithms, and they spent a ton of time carefully tweaking
the output of the entire system to closely match their old systems that did use external
sensors.
I’m still trying to get to the screen here.
I can remove the screen assembly from the metal shield with these screws, but it looks
like the screen is glued to this black frame.
Hold up—a quick pull on one of these tabs reveals some stretch-release adhesive!
It breaks a few times during the pull, but there are several tabs all connected to the
same adhesive perimeter.
This is seriously cool.
I get so excited about stretch release adhesive because it’s basically a sign that the design
team thought about the removal procedure.
I am curious about how many of these screens fail or break and need to be replaced, because
it seems like this would be pretty protected in there.
But hey, I guess anything can happen in the metaverse.
Finally, here’s the screen.
It’s basically a smartphone LCD display with the non-important parts blacked out,
which you can barely see here under the right reflections.
This LCD is a sort of sideways step from the original Quest headset, which had an OLED
panel that was slightly less high-res and had a lower refresh rate.
I’d say it’s a good tradeoff.
That’s the end of this Quest, and we’ve learned that the future of VR can totally
be cordless—as long as you’ve got some computer vision algorithms to lean on.
And I’m happy to say that this thing is decently repairable, though it takes a while
to get to the all-important battery and there are a bunch of fiddly clips and parts to deal
with along the way.