[polyomino]

It could be done, but there are more tradeoffs than at first glance. They probably didn’t do this because when they took the battery off the head it was already too late to redesign the thing again.

You would need to propagate signals from all the sensors back and forth which adds some overall weight in copper, and perhaps latency for more encoding and decoding. Could be worth it, we’ll see in v2.

[iandanforth]

Tried it today. The weight is a real problem. I'd gladly have a larger side pack to lose weight off the headset. If they ditched the useless eye screen, and moved the m2 to a pack they could probably drop 100g from the headset.

[gwd]

ISTR somewhere someone saying that moving it to the pack would break their really low latency processing requirements. Distance / latency options are fundamentally limited by the speed of light.

[vlabakje90]

Light travels 300km in one millisecond, so I doubt that's a limitation here.

[CuriouslyC]

This is true but keep in mind that once latency starts to go over ~10ms it starts to become noticeable for a lot of people, and even if it isn't directly noticeable it's likely that VR latency still causes some physiological issues for most people.

[Klathmon]

I believe it's more the processing that would be needed to send the data over the larger distance in fewer wires which would add latency.

You can't just take the absurd number of traces off a PCB and shove them into a wire without hitting issues like voltage drop, crosstalk, interference, or having a cable as thick as your finger.

[geerlingguy]

You'd need optical transceivers and at that point the added complexity and similar board space required might negate any weight savings (and drive up the price further).