After only three months of being acquired by Facebook for $2 billion, virtual reality company Oculus VR made an acquisition of its own. In an email, product design firm Carbon Design confirmed that the company had been bought by Oculus, maker of the Rift, a virtual reality headset used primarily for gaming.
“As part of the deal, the [Carbon Design] team will officially become a key component of the product engineering group at Oculus, operating from the Carbon studio in the Seattle area,” said the Oculus team in the email. “They’ll also be working closely with the Oculus R&D team based out of Redmond.”
According to Oculus, the company has been working with Carbon “for nearly a year on multiple unannounced projects.”
Oculus’ evolution in its virtual reality headset was announced in March when the company announced its second-generation development kit that brought multiple improvements, including a higher-resolution display and a motion-tracking camera.
Carbon Design, a Seattle-based product design firm, has more than 20 years of consumer, industrial, and medical product design experience. It’s perhaps most well-known for its work on a handful of prominent Microsoft products, including its Xbox 360 controller, Arc Touch Mouse, and Kinect camera.
“We’re on the cutting edge of defining how virtual reality looks, feels, and functions,” said Carbon Design’s creative director, Peter Bristol. “We’re incredibly excited to be part of the team and we’re looking forward to helping design the future.â€
The deal is expected to close by this summer.