Oculus VR is now owned by Facebook, but that won’t keep them from slurping up some companies of their own. Most recently, Oculus VR has agreed to snap up the Carbon Design Group, the designers behind the wonderful Xbox 360 controller and the original Kinect. Someday soon, it might not look quite so silly.
This is huge because so far, the Oculus Rift’s look and fit has yet to be finalised, and the Xbox 360 controller is a true triumph of design. There’s a reason that the Xbox 360 controller rose to be the de facto controller of its generation. Moreover, it’s a piece of tech that’s iconic among nerds and normals alike.
Peter Bristol, the Creative Director at Carbon Design explains the challenge of designing VR this way:
A few seconds with the latest Oculus prototypes and you know that virtual reality is for real this time. From a design and engineering perspective, building the products that finally deliver consumer virtual reality is one of the most interesting and challenging problem sets ever.
This is an entirely open product category. With consumer VR at its inception, the physical architectures are still unknown — We’re on the cutting edge of defining how virtual reality looks, feels, and functions.
We’re incredibly excited to be part of the team and we’re looking forward to helping design the future.
While a headset doesn’t require a whole lot of interaction so long as it fits on your face right, Oculus is up against the challenge of creating a product with a signature look and flair that can help define and inform an entire new class of products.
Oculus VR says it’s already been working with Carbon Design on multiple unannounced projects for almost a year now (???) and expects to close the deal this summer. The tech has been looking great for a while, but now it’s time to get a lot more excited about what the outside of this bad boy will look like. [Oculus VR]