Oculus releases Rift dev kit schematics under open-source license

Oculus is hosting its Oculus Connect dev conference this week, and to warm up the company today released the technical specs for its second Rift dev kit under an open-source license.

Since the company did the same thing for the first Rift dev kit last year, this now means that VR-curious devs can dig into the technical details of how the company worked its way through the Rift DK1 and the DK2. 

There's some fun bits of trivia in there, too; in a blog post highlighting the specs, Oculus' Nirav Patel notes that the company briefly tried working on a different kind of headset (referred to only as "DKHD") before scrubbing it in favor of what we now know as the DK2.

"DKHD was smaller and lighter than DK1 and had a fantastic pixel density," wrote Patel. "But was ultimately a dead end because it was unable to deliver presence in VR with a high persistence screen and orientation only tracking."

You could also conceivably try to build your own headset based on this new DK2 data dump, since it includes schematics and specs for everything from the optics to the mainboard firmware. However, the company cautions that a lot of the hardware will be difficult if not impossible to duplicate, as parts like the headset cable are too complex to be easily reproducible.

"The cable is surprisingly one of the most complex parts of the product, and is likely actually more advanced than the entirety of DK1," reads an excerpt of the DK2 data dump documentation. "This directory contains schematics and high level specifications for the cable, but this is a custom assembly that likely isn't achievable to recreate from source."

Curious devs can dig into the data themselves over on GitHub.