OCULUS Buys Design Team Behind Kinect and 360 Controller. Gotta buy em all!

THE OCULUS JUGGERNAUT SHALL NOT BE BOWED BY MORTAL OR DEITY. The company is acquiring talent like a motherfucker, and now they’re starting to snag up companies. The VR Headset That Shall Be has acquired the team that designed the Xbox 360 controller and the original Kinect. Kinect can get fucked and all that, but I’ll be goddamned if I wasn’t madly in love with the 360’s pad.

Oculus VR is now owned by Facebook, but that won’t keep them from slurping up some companies of their own. And most recently, Oculus VR has agreed to snap up the Carbon Design Group, the team behind the wonderful Xbox 360 controller and the original Kinect.

This is huge because so far, the Oculus Rift’s look and fit has yet to be finalized, and the Xbox 360 controller is a true triumph of design. There’s a reason that the Xbox 360 controller rose to be the defacto controller of its generation.

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.

[Gizmodo]