Oculus Rift teardown shows bill of materials and manufacturing just slightly over 200$

[LAwLz]

2 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

Yes we dont know, but i do not think its that expensive like Sakkura thinks it is

I don't know how much Sakkura think it costs, but I can tell you that if it's more than 10 dollars then Oculus are getting ripped off.

It's just a single, tiny, lens element.

 

 

Let's take a nifty 50 from Canon as another example (since people seem to like comparing the lenses inside the Oculus to DSLR lenses).

 

You can find a Canon 50mm lens for about 100 dollars. That lens contains 6 elements which are all much larger than the lenses inside the Oculus Rift. If you know the first thing about manufacturing, you will know that the difficulty of producing glass without imperfection grows exponentially with the size of the glass. Making the lens twice as large will make it more than twice as difficult to produce (the same goes for things like GPUs, CPUs, display panels and basically everything). So just from that we can do a conservative estimate that the lenses inside the Canon nifty 50 is about 10 times as difficult to manufacture (5 more elements all of which are much larger). But on top of the extra amount of glass, the lens will also include controllers and mechanical parts for the focusing and communication with the camera body (this also requires them to have extremely small margins of errors when it comes to weight, otherwise the focus doesn't work properly).

And not to mention that both the retailer and Canon themselves makes a profit when the 100 dollar lens gets sold.

 

 

Do you see why I think it is ridiculous to say that the manufacturing of the lenses inside the Oculus will cost more than like 10 dollars? It's because it is silly.

If Canon, Nikon, Sony and other manufacturers can make a profit at ~100 dollars, while producing lenses that are more than 10 times as difficult to manufacture, then paying more than 10 dollars for the Oculus Rift lenses is a joke.

They might have spent money in R&D to get the lenses in the first place, but there is no way they pay more than 10 dollars today for it.

 

 

 

2 hours ago, ElfenSky said:

Where does one go to get the wireless Xbox controller for 18$? I imagine it's partly a bulk discount, but from how many units? 

 

2 hours ago, Derangel said:

That would be one heck of a bulk discount. I wonder if they're just counting the total part cost of the controller in lieu of any real information on how much Oculus pays for each.

Palmer have said that "The Xbox controller costs us almost nothing to bundle".

IHS has people working on contacting manufacturing plants to track prices, so it is possible that they just had contact with whichever factory makes Xbox controllers directly.

 

 

Edit: Another thing I forgot to mention. Zuckerberg have said that he wants to sell 50 to 100 million Rifts "in the next few years", and considering how the lenses are one of the few things that won't become obsolete for a long time, they really don't have any excuse to not mass produce them.

[bcp]

@LAwLz I'm just curious if you own a Rift, or have any hands on experience. I have my CV1 sitting on my desk beside my Canon d5500. Not a top end camera I understand, but i can tell you the lenses on the Rift are not twice as large. In fact, the Oculus lens is individually slightly larger than the Canon. The enclosure holding it is less complex yes, but the individual glass specific lens component is larger, and i would say due to the Hybrid Fresnel nature of it more complex to assemble. Yes their is no citation for that, but I'm the assumption is based on the fact that it is a custom built lens of considerable size of the like that has NEVER been produce before. 

 

Assuming that the Canon nifty 50 is 10 times more difficult to produce is an absolute fallacy. Camera lenses are mass produced across a wide array of companies and manufacturers, some of which have been doing it for decades.  This specific lens has never before been built prior to being in the Oculus, and other than the Vive there is nothing like it anywhere in the market. Canon and Nikon can mass produce their lenses and have experience doing so for many years. Not to mention the technology they use in their cheaper lenses is just not at the same level as what the Rift has. Sorry, but they are more than 10$, I think anyone with a grain of common sense in their head can see and understand that a new product/technology as this is not going to be compared to "nuts, bolts and velcro", because thats just silly.

 

In case you dont believe me, a picture for reference....10x more difficult to produce....yeah right.

 

 

 

[LAwLz]

8 hours ago, bcp said:

@LAwLz I'm just curious if you own a Rift, or have any hands on experience. I have my CV1 sitting on my desk beside my Canon d5500. Not a top end camera I understand, but i can tell you the lenses on the Rift are not twice as large. In fact, the Oculus lens is individually slightly larger than the Canon.

Yeah, I totally underestimated the size of the lenses inside the Oculus Rift.

So it might not be 10 times as hard, but considering the way higher lens count, coatings and other electronics I'd still say the DSLR lens is much more difficult to manufacture.

And considering how the lens manufacturers actually make a profit from selling those 50mm lenses at 100 dollars I think it is silly to assume the lenses inside the Rift costs that much or even more to produce.

 

My estimate of 10 dollars was low, I'll admit. I thought the lenses were much smaller than that, and in that case it does seem like they were not included in the breakdown. But even if those lenses are really expensive to make and costs like 40 dollars (which is REALLY expensive, probably as high as the BOM for a full blown 50mm Canon lens), that still only puts the BOM at like 240 dollars. That's one hell of a profit margin.

 

 

By the way, IHS has a more detailed breakdown (the lenses are visible in several of the preview photos) which you sadly has to pay to get access to.

 

 

Edit: Wait a minute... I have seen people talk about how the plastic lenses scratches easily. Are the lenses in the Rift made out of plastic? If that's the case then I take everything in this post back. The lenses are less than 10 dollars for sure.

[MrDynamicMan]

On July 30, 2016 at 4:53 PM, zMeul said:

the suit started in 2014, if I recall; the judge already deneid FB's motion to dismiss

and last I heard, Zuckerberg testified

 

no merit? I think there's plenty

 

and Total Recall Technologies suit against Luckey himself!?

 

this whole company was built on shady "stuff"

 

---

 

last time I talked about the ridiculous prices of VR headsets I compared them with consoles

SONY and MS made a loss on each unit sold, their big income comes from the software: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2427757,00.asp

Ad hominem attacks to try and say "YUP. No RD at all. They basically already had the oculus YEARS ago. Thats why there were so many different prototypes, they were tricking us!"

 

oh dear Zmeul.

[bcp]

Doing some quick googling shows that in fact many high end DSLR lenses use non-glass components in the lens building process (fluorite, resin etc). 

 

For me this argument is moot anyways. It's clear that you have little experience with a Rift, have clearly never seen a picture of the lens but are arguing til you're blue in the face about all these negative points. I don't think it would hurt to research the topic that you are trashing a little bit more, and read the information presented in these articles like IHS a little bit more critically. It takes a big man to argue in the internet about things they have no experience with, it takes a bigger one to admit their wrong. Does the Oculus cost 599 to produce, likely not. But the 200$ estimate is not correct either. Forgetting/omitting the lenses in the calculation really just isn't acceptable. 

 

 

[LAwLz]

1 hour ago, bcp said:

Doing some quick googling shows that in fact many high end DSLR lenses use non-glass components in the lens building process (fluorite, resin etc). 

It is sometimes used for some of the inner elements (unless you are getting some super cheapo lens from a Chinese market). Not all of the optics like in this case.

 

1 hour ago, bcp said:

For me this argument is moot anyways. It's clear that you have little experience with a Rift, have clearly never seen a picture of the lens but are arguing til you're blue in the face about all these negative points. I don't think it would hurt to research the topic that you are trashing a little bit more, and read the information presented in these articles like IHS a little bit more critically. It takes a big man to argue in the internet about things they have no experience with, it takes a bigger one to admit their wrong. Does the Oculus cost 599 to produce, likely not. But the 200$ estimate is not correct either. Forgetting/omitting the lenses in the calculation really just isn't acceptable. 

What negative points am I arguing for? I have barely said anything negative about the Oculus Rift at all in this thread.

It seems like some people are very defensive when it comes to how much a product costs to make for some reason. I really don't see how "huh, that's a slightly lower BOM cost than I expected" is "trashing" on the Rift, and "bringing up negative points".

I haven't said anything about how the Oculus Rift performs in this thread.

 

I have seen pictures of the lenses, and I have done research about DSLR lens manufacturing (actually, when I was buying my Sigma 18-35mm lens I spent hours upon hours looking into lens manufacturing just to understand why it was so expensive... I have lots of free time.). I got the size of the CV1 lens wrong and I have admitted that.

 

 

We don't know if the lenses were omitted. The only way to know that would be to buy the detailed breakdown of their analysis and I am not going to do that. So for now all we can say is that it might be accurate, and it might not. We can not definitively say one way or the other.

 

 

Quite frankly it sounds like you are offended by the fact that the Rift is cheap to produce (which does not mean it was cheap to develop by the way) and is having buyers remorse. I wouldn't be offended if someone told me my 2500K had a BOM cost of like 10 dollars. I would say "that's a surprise, but it's still worth the price I paid to get it".

 

The lenses in the Oculus Rift are not rocket science. They are chunks of plastics (might just be a simple mold and polish job, without any significant cutting involved).