Meta Quest 3 batteries make up only 16% of the headset’s weight, so removing them will have little impact on weight reduction
Recently, iFixit disassembled the Quest 3 and found that with the front panel removed, the battery takes up almost all of the internal space. It makes you wonder how much of an impact removing the battery from the head unit would have on the Quest 3’s weight.
Some other headsets, such as the Pico 4 and Quest Pro, put the battery in a headband at the rear rather than in the front of the headset, while the Apple Vision Pro uses an external battery pack that removes the battery from the head entirely. But how much of an impact, if any, will this actually have on the Quest 3’s weight?
UploadVR reached out to Shahram Mokhtari, iFixit’s lead teardown technician who was responsible for the Quest 3’s teardown and asked him to weigh the battery after removal. He did and replied that the battery was only 64 grams.
The Quest 3 weighs 397 grams without the mask and headband, which means that the battery only accounts for 16% of that weight.
Of course, that 397-gram figure includes the side arms and speakers, which users won’t feel in front of their faces. If you remove them as well, the figure could be between 20% and 25%, which still isn’t a huge difference.
A way to make the headset lighter would be to remove the computing hardware from it, but that would be more complicated from an engineering standpoint, and would probably require a thick and expensive connection cable between the computing unit and the sensors and display. And that compute unit would almost certainly have to be bigger and thicker than the phone, as it would require a larger battery and cooling fan to support the sustained high performance required by the XR. The Magic Leap 2’s compute unit is like a fanny pack, for example.
It’s possible to reduce the weight of the headset in other ways, though – micro OLEDs, for example, are lighter than LCD panels because they have a higher pixel density and don’t require a separate backlighting layer. Additionally, while headsets like the Quest 3 are optimized for peak performance, in the future we may also see weight-optimized headsets that use downclocked chips and lighter cooling components or even one-day fanless designs.
Currently, thinner headsets like the Quest 3 will feel lighter, if not actually lighter, because the weight is closer to the user’s face.
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