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Jon Bruner

@JonBruner

Apr 9 • 23 tweets • 10 min read • Read on X

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We CT scanned an Apple Vision Pro! We also scanned two Meta headsets. Here’s what we found inside, and what it says about the two companies’ approach to AR/VR and to hardware development in general. 🧵

Here are our industrial CT scans of the Meta Quest Pro and Meta Quest 3 headsets. If you want to explore these scans, head to . Now let’s see what we found… lumafield.com/article/apple-…

Apple and Meta have taken different approaches to the market: the Vision Pro is a premium technology showcase for early adopters, while the Meta headsets are priced for accessibility in order to get as many people into the metaverse as possible.

Quick background on industrial CT: scanners like the @Lumafield Neptune use the same technology as medical CT scanners, taking X-ray images from different angles to create a detailed 3D model. Industrial scanners have a different form factor (fully enclosed in a cabinet to shield operators from X-rays) and can produce scans at higher resolution than medical scanners. When we visualize industrial CT scans, we can scrub through slices (the way most radiologists read medical CT scans) but we can also inspect them as freeform 3D models. CT scans can differentiate materials by density, and analysis software like @Lumafield Voyager can strip away lower-density material like plastic to isolate higher-density material, like the copper in electronics. Now back to the AR headsets…

The product development process is a series of tradeoffs, as designers and engineers iterate to balance original vision against the reality of manufacturing. Apple famously prioritizes design, challenging its engineers to hit aggressive targets without compromising on form.

The Vision Pro is a great illustration. It has a curvilinear enclosure that isn’t ideal for fitting large PCBAs. As a result, its main board is split into two angled sections. The Metas have blockier outer profiles, which allows their main boards to fit without being divided.

The Vision Pro also has lots of details that are expensive to implement but give it a more unified user experience. Here’s the motor and worm gear assembly that slides the left lens to automatically align it with the wearer’s pupils. There’s a mirrored assembly on the right.

Floating in front of each lens is a ring of small, very dense objects. These are the magnets that hold the Vision Pro’s optional, custom-made correctional lenses. The Meta headsets are simply designed to let users wear their own glasses.

The Meta headsets ship with handheld controllers. These are quite complex, with electronics on several differently-angled planes to support an ergonomic form factor. In our scans, the large lithium-ion battery in the handle stands out.

The Vision Pro takes a different approach: it’s controlled by a combination of eye and hand tracking. The headset is loaded with sensors to make this work. Here are some of the cameras and IR illuminators that help the VP track its user’s hands.

All of these headsets produce lots of heat. The Meta Quest Pro has a unibrow-shaped heat pipe filled with a coolant that evaporates near hot electronics and condenses near a pair of fans. The Quest 3 has just a single fan and no heat pipe.

The Vision Pro has a pair of large fans sandwiched between its displays and its main PCBAs. Look at these huge bearings! They run silently, with vanes that both quiet the airflow and move air away from the wearer.

The Quest Pro’s battery is at the back of the headband. This helps balance the headset and moves the battery away from the heat of the headset’s processor. It also requires an unusual curved battery design. (The coil is a spring inside the headset tensioner knob.)

Our scan shows that each battery in the Quest Pro is attached to a single connector. But there’s also a mysterious set of pads on a flex PCB against each battery. Could these detect flexing/swelling of the battery? Or maybe they’re just pogo pin pads for testing or pre-charging?

The Quest 3’s battery is in the headset itself, where it fits against the main board. This is an advantage of the Quest 3’s relatively blocky enclosure: it’s easy (cost-effective) to layer in lots of rectangular components by just stacking them on top of each other.

The Vision Pro’s battery is an externally-worn pack that contains 3 LiPo batteries with a honeycomb plate separating two of them. The plate could help with heat management, or it could just add rigidity to the assembly.

The Vision Pro battery pack uses a proprietary connector that’s pretty wild. This is the kind of thing engineers can develop when they have unlimited resources.

If you have a Vision Pro or Meta Quest, try opening Voyager on it! Here are links directly to the scans:
Vision Pro:
Quest Pro:
Quest 3: app.lumafield.com/project/606210…
app.lumafield.com/project/1ba44a…
app.lumafield.com/project/ae5aa2…

https://x.com/JonBruner/status/1773474799777681808

We also worked with the folks at @JigSpace to view one of our scans in 3D (this is a Luer lock–check out the thread for more on how these ingenious medical connectors work).

https://x.com/JonBruner/status/1773474799777681808

Explore these scans, and read more detail on the design of these headsets, here: lumafield.com/article/apple-…

Want to learn about industrial CT and how it’s used? Check out our explainer video here:

Wish you had watched a video version of this instead of reading a long Twitter thread? Here you go.

So you've made it to the end of a very long thread about industrial CT. Would you like to work at Lumafield? We're hiring in engineering, sales, and marketing! lumafield.com/careers

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More from @JonBruner

Jon Bruner

@JonBruner

Dec 4

This looks like an ordinary USB-C connector, but when we CT scan it, we find something sinister inside…🧵

https://x.com/JonBruner/status/1714696044356005949

Last year we CT scanned a top-of-the-line Thunderbolt 4 connector and were astonished to find a 10-layer PCB with lots of active electronics. A lot of people saw the scan and wondered whether malicious electronics could be hidden in a tiny USB connector.

https://x.com/JonBruner/status/1714696044356005949

The answer is yes. This is an cable created by @_MG_, a security researcher and malicious hardware expert. It looks like an ordinary USB cable, but it can log keystrokes, inject malicious code, and communicate with an attacker via WiFi. Let’s see inside… O.MG

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Jon Bruner

@JonBruner

Oct 8

We just announced a major breakthrough in X-ray CT technology at @lumafield: scans that take hours with conventional CT will now take seconds. Here's why that's important 🧵

A CT scan is the richest possible source of industrial inspection data: it gives you a full 3D model of your part, inside and out, along with relative density information. But it's always been too slow for use in high-volume production environments—until now.

By bringing scan times down to as little as 0.1 seconds, we've overcome the major drawback of CT. Now it's a practical inspection technology for high-volume production.

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Jon Bruner

@JonBruner

Sep 25

Pens are made by the billion, require insane precision, and still work almost every time. We CT scanned a few common pen types to see what’s inside... 🧵

First up: a fountain pen 🖊️ These date back to the 10th century, but practical designs appeared in the 19th century. When the pen is tilted, gravity pulls ink from a cartridge to the nib. Capillary action pulls the ink through a slit in the nib, where it flows onto the page. Here are the 2D X-ray radiographs we captured of a fountain pen; we use software to reconstruct them into a 3D model (next tweet).

Here’s the 3D reconstruction of a retractable fountain pen—the Mahjohn A1. Our CT scan of the pen tip shows a spring loaded door that opens and closes to prevent the ink from drying out and to protect the nib.

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Jon Bruner

@JonBruner

Mar 28

This is an industrial X-ray CT scan of a Luer activated valve—a tiny medical connector that costs just 75 cents but is remarkably complex. Let’s take a look at how it works… 🧵

Luer connectors are used to join medical tubing for fluid delivery—think tubes that hook into IV bags, or needles that fit onto the ends of syringes. Hospitals use thousands every day. They twist together with less than one turn and must be secure and completely leakproof.

These connectors have an added feature: silicone valves that stop fluid from leaking out when disconnected. The valves are silicone sleeves with a slit at one end. The two connectors shown here work differently…

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Jon Bruner

@JonBruner

Mar 14

We CT scanned a Stanley Quencher cup to look for the lead that’s supposedly inside. Here’s what we found, and what it says about how these cups are made… 🧵

These cups have been a viral sensation, increasing Stanley’s revenue 10X since 2019. But late last year, social media influencers discovered lead in the cups. Stanley confirmed the cups contain lead, but says the lead doesn’t contact the cup’s contents. So what’s going on?

Here’s a @lumafield CT scan of a Stanley Quencher. Using X-ray images taken from different angles, we’ve constructed a 3D model that includes internal and external features. We can crop into the cup to see its cross section.

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Jon Bruner

@JonBruner

Feb 28

This is a CT scan of Heinz’s new ketchup cap. It represents a $1.2 million engineering investment over 8 years. Here’s why it’s significant… 🧵

This is the previous Heinz cap design. CT scans like @lumafield’s capture density, shown here on a blue-red spectrum. There are three plastics in this cross-section. The bottle is PET, and the cap is unlabeled but likely polypropylene. Inside the cap is another material.

@lumafield @HeinzTweets @KraftHeinzCo @BerryGlobalInc It's a small silicone valve. Here we strip out low-density plastic (the PP cap) and isolate the PET body and the silicone valve. Silicone is flexible and durable, and the design of the valve lets ketchup pass at a predictable rate when the bottle is squeezed.