Gadgetory

welcome to CNET and tech republics cracking open where we take apart two latest technology and show you what's inside I'm Bill Detweiler and as you can see I'm wearing something on my head and I'm here with CNET's Aaron Carson what do I have here and what is this thing this is an oculus go what's unique about the oculus go you know we it's a VR headset obviously what makes it cool and why am I gonna take it apart yeah so you might have run into VR headsets in the past few years but this one is different because everything the processor all the sensors are contained within this all right so everything like the PlayStation VR the oculus rift the HTC vive they have cables right to connect them to your Playstation or a computer or and so this one's completely self-contained kind of like when you have the ones that you put your phone on like the Samsung gear VR things like that but this one you don't need a phone for right and that's the exciting part okay you don't need anything else to use this so that's why we thought it would be cool to take it apart right it is to see what's inside this to see the hardware that oculus put inside and to see how it how it works so we'll start I guess there's this little phone thing here kind of looks like a masquerade ball mask right you know for a fancy ball it's kind of comfortable you know you tested this out a lot what did you think while I'm taking this apart as far as the comfort goes compared to other ones yeah so one thing that's been really nice over the years is that VR headsets are getting more and more comfortable um you see this nice plush padding this is not how it used to be okay oh you know once upon a time you would have just sort of like a little little rim of foam and that was the best you could hope for but yes I've been playing around with this for about a week or so and it's been a good time so far I have to say and so we've taken the we've taken the cushion off and it looks like inside here what we see is a bunch of standard Phillips screws so that's nice I like when we don't have to have special screwdrivers to remove them this is just a triple zero screwdriver so it's pretty small I mean it comes in a specialty screwdriver set usually you may not find it at your average hardware store but you can find them online everywhere a part of electronics tools we're gonna keep removing it's actually you might be a little easier let's take off the strap here now what did you think about the comfort of the head strap compared to some of the other ones that you've used it took a little finesse adjusting it but something that I do like is you actually have the option of taking that top head strap okay off just in case it's too much or if you're like you're me and you have a lot of hair okay so you can wear me just just the sides okay it doesn't work as well like that does it stay on your head when you're using it it does okay right you know you can you can kind of adjust the straps just by pulling and tightening on the sides or loosening so you don't even really have to take it off to adjust you can just be in the midst of doing whatever it is you want to do in VR and make sure that it fits comfortably that's good that's really kind of cool and it has a controller with it there right a wireless controller and how does that work so this is basically just a standard controller you've got a touchpad you've got a trigger kind of on the butt bottom and a few buttons um you know not not too much to write home about but it is nice to have the option of having something in your hand you can use the lanyard to make sure that you don't accidentally like fling the controller into a wall or something which you would be surprised how often that happens so we've also popped out these little plastics or Eyring 's again if you wear them they help the screen conform to your eyes here and so you know I can look like Jack Sparrow here with too much eye makeup on here now that we have those removed it looks like I think and we have the screws removed that we can pop the outer shell away from this and maybe lift off this back plastic piece here it's fairly light what did you think about the weight I'm surprised how light it is well that's a really kind important aspect of this is that some of the older VR headsets like we were talking about they were also a heavier and it just has this way of pulling down in your face but this is one is a little easier to manage you're still gonna get the lines like the red marks on your face if you've you know had had the the headset on for you know an hour or two but it but yeah you definitely don't have that feeling of like oh this is just okay so we kind of popped this loose it there's some plastic snaps that are in here I want to try and do this pretty gingerly here move it you know whenever we're taking things apart we always try to take things apart not destroy them and in a way that we can put them back together and if there is a problem with this it does look like you know if the battery what it has a battery in it right yeah you can charge it and you're gonna get about two two and a half hours of charge out of it if the battery were to start to run down and not hold a charge or you know degrade over time not hold a charge it looks like it wouldn't be too difficult or out of the realm of possibility to take this thing apart and put a new battery in it I'll see if I can turn this over here so we have the this little plastic cover here off now see if I can't we can't get a shot inside there so we can see my two lenses that cover the screens you put up to your eye you can see some of the some of the other components still seem to be hidden behind this black plastic housing again more Phillips screws inside we're gonna keep keep going oh and you were telling you something before we started and we can kind of start to see them inside the speaker's right so tell me a little bit about the speakers the speakers are here on each side here and here tell me a little bit about those speakers and how they work yeah so this is kind of a feature of this headset that I was particularly impressed with you have built-in speakers and the sound kind of comes through these hollow little straps on the side and kind of like eyeglasses like you have a repair of right hard to go over your ears all right so you know you do have the option of using headphones but in the time that I was using I really didn't feel like I had to this sound was pretty immersive and it's coming out right by your ears anyways so cool there's a lot more screws in here so you know why I remove all the little screws tell us what your favorite experience was what were some of the ones that really stood out to me yeah so if there's a ton there's more than a thousand they say in the oculus store so there's a lot that's been out there for the past several years you know one that I found absolutely charming and it's not new but it's called bait and it's just it's a fishing game okay it gives you all these really serene little lakes one is kind of like a nice tropical island the other one is sort of just like interesting swamp and you can just kind of sit there with your VR headset on and and fish like cats the line and all that and it's just like it was weirdly soothing and then there's a you know there's another free app that I was kind of checking out called pet lab okay which it it almost feels like a little bit of a riff on the Harry Potter world where you're in some kind of magical universe and you can create these little alien fuzzballs than aliens there's they're just little monsters that are that are very cute the thing that we do find a lot is that a lot of these games and apps are cool and they're fun but don't necessarily have like a long shelf life you might feel like an allergy yeah you might not play it like a third time or a fourth time okay all right once we go inside here there are a lot of little screws that we can remove and we have to say if you went on the online there was acts of Palmer Luckey actually went out and posted a teardown of this a few weeks ago when it first came out however it didn't actually show how they took it apart they just showed it all in pieces which is pretty cool in and of itself but so we wanted to do this to show everybody how we can take it apart so I've removed all of the screws that I can see inside here except for the holding the speakers on the side of the housing here and now I think I can't pull anything out this way so I think what we need to do is flip it over here to the front and we're gonna try and pop loose some of the plastic tabs maybe that are right here along the side so hopefully we can do that and not break anything up there we go yeah this will pop loose now that we have the screws loose we and that's something we always try to do you know is with these take these apart in a way that lets us put them back together and have them function so sometimes that means and I've never taken this apart before and so that means kind of learning as we go and being gentle as we can and not sort of forcing things talked a little bit about the simulator sickness because I know you've done a lot of you've written a lot about that what do you simulator sickness how does it affect people I mean it's kind of like you know if you've been to a 3d movie what happens but what does it really do here sure so you know it's basically this idea that your brain and your body are kind of out of sync you know there's this thing called lag that's tied to low refresh rates which is basically like how many images you're we're seeing in the you know seconds and it's it's really disconcerting if for example you turn your head and the world you're looking at doesn't come with you and so so your brain interprets that's odd disconnect as you have been poisoned right that's what you were telling me once it was it's actually a response to you being poisoned ooh and and just that right at just the right moment we were able to pop loose the front cover here which looks like it actually holds this is pretty interesting the heat sink so remember you were talking about the phones getting really hot it looks like the heat sink for this is actually because you can see these little little tube here the heat sink and you can see a little the thermal you know thermal not paste these days but thermal pads here that touch against the processors we'll look at some of these chips a little bit later but we can actually see that here to help prevent that from getting hot right like you're accountable alright so inside here we can see the main circuit board here we can also see some of these little foldable flexible cables that run from the circuit board back probably to the LCD displays that are behind that so we're gonna keep going I'm gonna go ahead and try to remove the screws that hold the circuit board onto this plastic brain here and see if we can't get that out there are a lot of screws in here there are a lot of cables and connectors attached to the circuit board so I'm gonna go ahead and disconnect all of those very gently these foldable flexible or folding flexible cables are really sort of thin we don't want to damage those we can see cables here for the speakers I don't want to damage those I don't know if they will come out I think we have a connector here maybe for the battery Oh actually this is for the battery there actually and we can remove oh there we go yeah great so these are little metal covers that are covering up some of the other connectors here we're gonna put those to side here we have a large battery cell I believe so let's see if this we can pull this out so you can see if I can separate it here it's probably a little bit of adhesive in here usually they are and it's got a little adhesive but can be stubborn yeah just a little bit not too bad there we go so you can see the adhesive right here here we have this is a lithium ion battery cell and I think it is a what is this it's a pretty good sized cell to 2600 milliamp hour nine point three six watt hour battery so it's pretty good size matter much bigger than a smart phone much bigger than you would find in a you know we usually in a portable device maybe more so like a laptop or something like that with that out of there and that comes out of the back here we're gonna go ahead and disconnect this cable here these this is an antenna cable it goes behind there I'll go ahead and pop this loose from the system board again being very careful here not to break it but still let other people kind of see there are these little caches there we go now we have the antenna cable loose for the wireless system and the wireless antenna here and then we have another antenna cable there alright so the only thing holding us in or I think the connector cable on the top which I believe is a little IR it looks like there's a little IR sensor here that detects when it's actually attached to to your head or on your head which is handy and so we're gonna disconnect that being very gentle here again using a pair of little ESD safe electrostatic discharge safe tweezers we've got that done there and now the only thing that we have connecting us are the speaker cables and again we're gonna try and be really careful there we go I got one connector pulled out really careful here pull that out alright boom and we have it so we have the circuit board for the oculus Go VR and then here we have attached this plastic inner frame right here we also have the LCD the screens would be behind here we'll see if we can't get those out in a minute and then the lenses and the other plastic here so it's very componentized so I like that the speakers obviously we talked about are here and here and they go through these hollow tubes kind of show this to the camera here there are these holes and that we talked about that a little bit earlier we'll see if we can't remove those too but for now I want to spend some time on the circuit board and sort of look at some of the the chips that are actually on the circuit board here I think let's see if we can remove them I don't know how many of these shields were going to be able to remove we're gonna try it if they're not soldered in place that's always frustrating when they're soldered in place and it makes it you know almost them it makes it difficult to remove them if not impossible without damaging the component there's still a little bit of metal shielding but we can see the a couple of the main chips the oculus this is a it comes in two versions right this is a 64 gig version which is the storage it also comes in a 32 32 okay and so there's minimal price difference I think between the two so if you're gonna get one just just get the 64 if you can find it and you can see the storage chip right here this looks like it's an SK Hynix chip for the 64 gig storage chip you can also see the processor down here now this processor it's actually a Snapdragon 820 one processor so that was the same processor that was using the first Google pixel phone so it's kind of interesting to the trivia they're really interesting though to see everything that's on the board here and now this does have both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth it does not have good okay no Bluetooth okay so it is Wi-Fi no Bluetooth there so let's see if we can't get a few more components out of this so so tell me a little bit about the future of VR I mean where do we think we're gonna be in one year what do we think we're gonna be in five years is it gonna be one of the sort of the dominant forms of gaming of entertainment it is just still so hard to say sometimes you know like we were talking a little bit adoption can be tricky you know this is something that perhaps is really appealing for folks who are you know will get here a little more technical but you know it's kind of hard to get a grasp on how far we are from say like every household having a virtual reality headset and I think part of that is you know we still really need to find that just dynamite use case for why you absolutely have to have virtual reality alright so it still needs a killer app it does alright so with we removed a couple or more few more screws and we can now lift out what is the display assembly and the lenses here for the the displays I don't see a good way now this is something we find inside these devices - I don't see a good way to actually remove the displays from this assembly it appears that it could be that there is a way to get these apart it could be physical connections I'll do okay I'll try here so yeah we can lift the we can separate that and we do see our display here this would be the LCD screen and as opposed to two small screens one large screen here and there are these small tabs on either side right here and they're adhesive they're basically tabs attached to an adhesive that runs probably the perimeter of this or around certain parts of this I could pull these out and I think the screen would come right out the or the LCD would come right out and have no problems problem is I'm not sure I could buy new adhesive that would match the correctly to put it back in I could I get some other adhesive put it back in sure I could do that but I'm gonna leave it in there for now there's nothing really to see on the other side of this except for the LCD and I want to put this back together again so we're gonna leave this intact and what we're gonna do is we're gonna turn our attention running out of space here we're gonna turn our attention back to the frame here and I'm gonna remove the two speakers so that we can see how they how they transmit the sound through these little hollow tube and then we'll be almost up we can also see attach to this these are the Wi-Fi antennas here on either side so there's one here and there's one here and these are the speakers so so I've removed the screws it looks like these little plastic pieces connect on here we're gonna see if I can pop it loose up breaking it and there we go we can pop that loose right like that and so you can kind of see the hollow this hollow tube here and then we can see our little speakers right like this right here umm well I think that about does it I mean there's not much else for us to really take apart on the device I think it's really cool to see how they've managed to put everything into the headset I mean they're basically what they've done is as opposed to taking your cell phone and sticking it on the front of your oven just a set of goggles a plastic head said they've taken those same components and they built them into the goggles and done it at a really affordable price point so that does it for this edition of cracking open Aaron thank you for being here and sharing all your view our knowledge with us be sure to check out CNET's youtube channel for all our cracking open shows and check out TechRepublic for a complete teardown photo gallery and a list of all the hardware inside the oculus go VR