Oculus VR acquires Xbox 360 pad maker Carbon Design

Oculus VR, flush with Facebook billions, is continuing to poach major industry talent with the news that the company has acquired Carbon Design Group, best known for creating the Xbox 360 controller and original Kinect depth-sensing camera system.

A major Kickstarter success story, the company behind the Oculus Rift head-mounted virtual reality system was acquired by Facebook for $2 billion earlier this year. Prior to that, crowd-funded cash and millions in venture capital had allowed the company to hire some big in the industry including id Software co-founder John Carmack. The process continued post-acquisition with, among others, the lead electrical engineer on wearable computing project Google Glass heading over to the company - and now Oculus VR has made its first acqui-hire.

Oculus VR has, it announced late last night, acquired the Carbon Design team best known for creating the Xbox 360 controller. According to the company's statement, the two have been working hand-in-hand for the past year on various unannounced projects, and are now to work as an extension of the Oculus research and development team out of their existing Seattle studio.

'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,' claimed Carbon Design's creative director Peter Bristol of his new paymaster's technology. '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.'

The deal, financial terms of which have not been made public, is expected to close by the end of summer.