I'm taking apart my soon-to-be-bricked HP WMR headset. Mainly following the community contributed teardown guide on iFixit plus my own detour into stuff like the headband. My next detour is to take apart its display unit.

The iFixit community guide left it as a single unit, with good reason. I found out it is a slim lightweight assembly mostly held together with adhesive strips. (Double-sided tape) I'm not sure it is possible to disassemble it neatly. My disassembly was an irreversibly destructive procedure.

The display unit consists of two nearly identical assemblies, one for each eye. Given that fact I am grumpy they didn't design a way to adjust the distance between them to match an user's interpupillary distance. I had thought that limitation reflected a headset built on a single wide LCD a la Google Cardboard. But it wasn't! They were two separate square LCD units. Majority of wires lead to the actual liquid crystal matrix. The four-pin connector to the right lead to an LED strip for backlight.

I tried to disassemble the right eye assembly first, starting from the back. After releasing a metal frame fastened with six screws, I found everything else was taped down. Peeling this backlight diffuser assembly broke the white plastic frame because that thin strip of tape was apparently stronger than the plastic.

After much snap-crackle-and-popping, the light diffusion films were removed and I could see the row of white backlight LEDs.

I managed to peel off the LED strip intact...

But I completely destroyed the LCD matrix in doing so. That's a thin sliver of LCD stuck to the back, with its matrix circuitry visible. Ugh, what a mess.

For the other side, I decided to try approaching from the front. I first removed the Fresnel lens, which was held by its own ring of adhesive tape.

Carefully pushing from the front allowed me to remove this second screen assembly intact. That's better than before!

But I still couldn't cleanly separate the LCD matrix from its backlight. Glass cracked, liquid smeared, plastic tore. It ended up just as big of a mess as the first try. Oh well.

I doubt I could line up the diffusion film with the LED strip again, so I failed to salvage two diffuse square white light sources. But the LED strips themselves might still be useful. They're good candidates for building a rig to side-illuminate small circuit boards. These Fresnel lenses will join my salvaged Google Cardboard lenses in my bin of parts awaiting potential future projects.

Next up: the controllers.