Oculus VR's Rift gaming headset received a sterling repairability mark from the teardown artists at iFixit, scoring a 9 out of 10 after iFixit found it was able to dismantle the system in under 10 minutes.

The only caveatthe Oculus Rift in its current form is a developer kit prototype and the final version may be assembled differently, the site noted.

The Kickstarter-funded Oculus Rift was a huge hit at the Game Developer Conference last month. It delivers a virtual reality gaming experience through a strap-on headset sporting a 7-inch, 720p LCD display offering up 1,280-by-800 resolution, or 640-by-800 per eye in the binocular configuration, with a 90-degree field-of-view plus ultra-low latency head tracking.

Interestingly, while Oculus has stated that the Rift's head-tracking sensitivity, accomplished with a gyroscope, accelerometer, and magnetometer, provides 6 degrees of freedom, iFixit put it at 3 degrees.

The Oculus Rift runs through a control box that connects to a PC. Players use a standard, hand-held game controller to play Oculus Rift games like Hawken, which use the Unreal Engine 3 game engine for DirectX 11.

The iFixit team couldn't get enough of the Oculus Riftafter playing Team Fortress 2 on the system, "even the non-gamers were amazed," the site gushed. Many staffers, however, experienced some queasiness, a common side effect of the virtual reality experience that subsides for most folks with more playing time.

The headset's inter-pupillary distance (IPD) and game settings, meanwhile, require some fiddling before playing, iFixit found. The site said the process took "a couple of hours," so this is an area on which Oculus VR might want to work.

As for the teardown, iFixit was pleased to find that the Rift developer kit "uses standard screws, has pretty much no adhesive, and the whole thing comes apart in under 10 minutes."

What's inside the Oculus Rift? After unfastening clips, removing screws, and pulling the system apart, here are the key components iFixit discovered:

The headset's Innolux HJ070IA-02D 7-inch LCD display with a Himax HX8851 timing controller on the back.



The Oculus Tracker V2 board, also in the headset, custom designed and optimized for a 1000 Hz refresh rate.



Key chips on the Oculus Tracker V2 boardan STMicroelectronics 32F103C8 ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller with 72 MHz CPU, Invensense MPU-6000 six-axis (gyro + accelerometer) motion tracking controller, and what looks to be a three-axis magnetometer labeled A983 2206, which iFixit guessed is "used in conjunction with the accelerometer to correct for gyroscope drift."



The control box motherboard with a Realtek RTD2486AD display interface controller, Winbond W25X20CL 256KB serial flash module, and Techcode TD1484A synchronous rectified step-down converter. "[O]ur Rift is essentially a beta product, so we're not sure how much it will differ from the final, consumer version," iFixit cautioned, but promised to "put the final version under the knife in due time." Oculus VR is currently shipping the Rift developer kit to its Kickstarter backers but hasn't announced when the system will be made available to the public or named a price for the final product. For more, check out PCMag's recent Hands On With the Oculus Rift Developer Kit, as well as an an earlier hands-on with the system at CES in January.

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