Oculus VR, the company behind the visionary VR headset Oculus Rift, has just announced their plans to acquire Carbon Design Group, the company behind the now-iconic and PC gaming standard Xbox 360 gamepad, along with the original Kinect sensor.
This is huge news for a company whose product, and its practical gaming concepts really came into question after Facebook’s $2 billion acquisition. Also notable is that this acquisition of the Carbon Design Group isn’t he first time they’ve brushed shoulders, having apparently “multiple unnanounced projects” in the works over the past year prior.
While Oculus is busy impressing everyone with the forward-thinking technological wizardry their headset represents, CDG will hopefully be the company that makes the device look and feel more comfortable overall. Their commitment to ergonomics going without saying from their previous projects, I would guess an underlying concern would be towards making the device look and feel appealing to consumers, tech be damned.
Perhaps future iterations won’t make your head look like a jellyfish anymore, or, a high tech facehugger? Also, because movement has not yet been considered, a controller similar to what Sony has planned for tracking in 3D space (what that blue light emanating from the DualShock 4 is truly meant for) will likely be addressed with their own solution as well.
This just became very interesting to some of us in the cave..
This writer just knows, if they expect us to wear it for any measure of time (and given what I’ve read elsewhere, it seems like you’d want to wear it for a WHILE), this would be the primary concern. Also one to consider with Sony’s own Project Morpheus gunning for the same space, and sooner than one may think.
The VR race is beginning to feel like the Space one, and may be about to get very interesting indeed..
