I’ve been an avid reader of Karl Guttag‘s excellent blog covering the latest and greatest in AR and VR optics, and I thought it would be interesting to actually get my hands on some of these products and take a peek at how mass production units actually implement the optical paths we always see in schematics drawn by great engineers online. To kick off a series of XR headset teardowns, DTC started with the Xreal Air – an admittedly older unit at this point, but I think you will be surprised how similar many other headsets on the market use a very similar optical architecture…

P.S. – I realize the schematic in the video of the optical path is quite small. Here’s a higher resolution version that details all of the layers and components we looked at in the teardown!