14 DAY TRIAL // It appears that Oculus VR got an appetite for acquiring stuff after being bought by Facebook, as the company is currently looking to gobble up the Carbon Design Group, an industrial design and product engineering company.
Although Oculus VR is yet to release its first commercial product, the company is well known across the globe for its foray into virtual reality gaming with the Oculus Rift headset, which Facebook apparently plans to use for shoving pictures of other people's cats and ads in your face even while you attempt to get away from the drudgery of your mundane life with some sweet first-person dragon-blasting action in Skyrim.
The Carbon Design Group is most notably known for having created the iconic Xbox 360 controller, along with the at-least-as-iconic Kinect sensor. The group was revealed to have been working together with Oculus VR for as long as a year now, developing unannounced projects, according to the official announcement.
"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," says Peter Bristol, creative director at Carbon Design.
"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," he continued.
Carbon Design has over 20 years of experience taking various consumer, industrial, and medical products from the concept phase to completion, and its past projects look nice enough to hang around the house as decorations. The fact that they actually do high-tech stuff is sort of a bonus.
It looks like virtual reality is poised to take over the real thing, and it's certainly going to be interesting to see what the minds behind the Oculus Rift are dreaming up next.
For now, the puzzle lies in whether the company has something brewing that's big enough to make it a better investment to buy them altogether, rather than simply licensing their tech.
In any case, having such an experienced team in-house will surely turn out for the best of the Oculus Rift's future, as well as for any other projects that Oculus VR might be considering.
