Oculus buy the company that designed Xbox 360 controller
Oculus VR, the company behind the Oculus Rift VR headset, which itself was recently acquired by Facebook has just bought a rather interesting company itself.
It seems the Facebook cash is turning out to be very useful. According to Bit-Tech, the Carbon Design Group is the company that designed the Xbox 360 controller and original Xbox Kinect camera… and it has just been gobbled up for an undisclosed sum.
Apparently the two companies have been working together for some time – on “various unannounced products”. Whilst we’re not sure what these are, it’d perhaps be reasonable to speculate that the company could be helping with a redesign of the existing Rift headset to use custom parts, and to make it more consumer-friendly. Commenting shortly after the Facebook acquisition, Oculus’ Palmer Luckey said:
“We have not gotten into all the details yet, but a lot of the news is coming. The key points: 1) We can make custom hardware, not rely on the scraps of the mobile phone industry. That is insanely expensive, think hundreds of millions of dollars. More news soon. 2) We can afford to hire everyone we need, the best people that fit into our culture of excellence in all aspects. 3) We can make huge investments in content. More news soon.”
Could Carbon Design be the “details”?
In any case, we’re still none the wiser about what Facebook is ultimately planning.
