A recent patent application for the upcoming Oculus Quest has shed more light on the mobile VR hardware and its fan-based cooling system.
Unlike connected PC based VR systems, where the PC I doing all the heavy lifting, standalone VR hardware contains all the bells and whistles in the headset hardware itself. Think, you have the screen display, processors and capacitors all giving off heat inside a self contained compartment. Things are going to get pretty toasty.
For short applications this may not be an issue, but with the Oculus Quest being touted as an all-in-one mobile gaming VR headset, there has to be some sufficient cooling needed to cool down the Snapdragon processor that will be doing all the heavy lifting whilst you enjoy playing the games on the Quest.
It was confirmed at Oculus Connect 5 that the Quest will have some kind of active cooling, and the recent patent images show exactly what its makers are doing with the cooling system inside the Quest headset.
Using a mix of heat pipes, a single active ‘Hybrid’ fan and a whole lot of metal framing to further dissipate the heat caused by the Snapdragon 835 in the Quest, it looks like we will see even greater performance over the passive cooling found in the Oculus Go with its Snapdragon 821 processor.
The power of the Quest has been touted as offering Xbox 360 generation quality graphics by Oculus CTO, John Carmack, who also thinks it will be in competition with the 20 million unit selling Nintendo Switch. It will be interesting to see how much visual quality the Quest can pump into our eyeballs. Over to you, developers.
[Source: Upload VR]
