we had seen early prototypes of home VR
systems before but 2016 was the year of
VR with three big system releases the
oculus rift cb1 the HTC vive and the
sony PSP are each using different tech
to power their virtual worlds so in no
particular order here's what we
discovered when we tore them down first
let's dive into the oculus rift after
four long years of development and a
couple of dev kits the highly
anticipated oculus rift finally arrived
on our teardown table this March we're
seeing stars well constellations to be
exact
ir leds around the front of the headset
and back of the headband leave no blind
spots for the constellation LED array
and no interruption and immersion oculus
ditched the interchangeable lenses we
found in the dev kit too in favor of a
pair of non removable asymmetric frontal
lenses we also found two OLED displays
each with a pixel density of 456 pixels
per inch and a combined resolution of
2160 by 1200 at that pixel density the
average user would need to be about
eight inches from the display for the
pixels to become indistinguishable but
thanks to the frontal lens design the
perceived distance is great enough to
achieve this effect with a much smaller
footprint next we tore down the HTC vive
we were expecting similar head-tracking
as the oculus rift but we're surprised
that it used the exact opposite
technique the rift uses a desk mounted
camera to track IR emitters in the
headset whereas the vive headset sees
light from the mounted IR emitters
without actually tracking its location
and a crazy amount of sensors there are
32 individually numbered sensors on the
headset and 24 on each controller there
are two
1080p mlah displays with a combined
resolution of 2160 by 1200 and unlike
the hybrid lenses we encountered in the
oculus rift the Vives lenses appear to
have a uniform contour it also comes
with a sunny optical technology made
front-facing camera to help merge the
physical world with the virtual after
dominating the hardware landscape for
forever sony decides to throw their hat
in the ring of
2016 VR battle how does the psvr differ
well unlike the other two units the psvr
doesn't require you to have a gaming PC
but you'll need a ps4 and a PlayStation
Eye camera it has a single 5.7 inch
AMOLED display with a resolution of 1920
by 1080
unlike the rift in the vive which rely
on invisible IR light for position
tracking the psvr uses 15 visible light
LEDs spread out around the front of the
mask and are tracked by the PlayStation
Eye camera and that's the best of our
2016 Virtual Reality teardowns hope you
enjoyed them as much as we did if you're
wondering if we put them back together
to compare user experiences my answer to
you is you better believe we did I only
threw up a few times but it was totally
worth it if you want to check out our
full teardown so you can find them at
ifixit.com and if you can't wait to see
what makes it to our teardown table in
2017 be sure to subscribe to our channel
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