Gadgets

Sony Just Won the Virtual Reality War

The 2016 VR battle rages on. Sony just threw their hat into the ring, debuting their years-in-the-making PlayStation VR. After dominating the hardware landscape for for-ev-er, we’re betting Sony will be a worthy contender against PC platform heavyweights. The verdict: Sony just won the war.

Regardless of resolution and actual games, this thing is really well-constructed, cheap, pretty accessible, and has the entire PlayStation marketplace backing it. We were able to use one screwdriver for the whole teardown and found just a few JIS screws holding the headset together. Sony also scored some bonus points for having the best cable management we’ve seen in VR. Their design approach is both elegant and simple—making for a pretty darn repairable device. In fact, it scored a solid 8/10 on our repairability scale.

Sony PlayStation VR teardown

PlayStation VR teardown highlights:

  • Discounting the 95 g counterweights in the back of the headband, the PS VR would come in at 515 g, right between the Vive’s 563 g and the Rift’s 470 g.  
  • We discovered the hardware powering the Processor Unit: a Marvell DE3214-B0 Armada 1500 Pro 4K CPU, 1 GB of Samsung DDR3 RAM, and a 4 GB Samsung SSD.
  • Unlike the Rift and Vive, which rely on invisible IR light for position tracking, the PS VR uses visible light LEDs, in that iconic PlayStation blue.
Sony PlayStation VR teardown

Check out the full teardown of the PSVR on iFixit.com.