The design firm behind the Xbox 360 controller and the original Kinect now belongs to Oculus VR. The team will be an important part for creating new controls and likely create better virtual reality experiences.

Oculus is continuing its quest to assemble a PC gaming super team, announcing that the company would acquire Carbon Design Group. The Carbon Design Group is a development studio for consumer and industrial products, which already won numerous design awards. In the gaming industry, the Carbon Design Group has been able to make a name for itself with the controller and the Kinect camera for the Xbox 360.

The amount of the transaction was not disclosed by the subsidiary of Facebook, but it is likely that the deal is worth tens of millions of dollars. Although both companies have worked together for over a year on several projects that are not yet announced, Oculus made ​​a formal purchase Carbon Design.

Oculus in a blog post said 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. They’ll also be working closely with the Oculus R&D team based out of Redmond.

“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,” said Peter Bristol, Carbon’s creative director. “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.”

Open to innovation

Carbon’s work on the 360 controller is particularly notable in the context of building a PC gaming super team. The 360 gamepad is widely hailed as one of the best console control devices.

The designer should play a key role in the development of virtual reality goggles by bringing a high-level of hardware design. The new team can help Oculus in its quest to create an appealing mass market device. It’s likely that the team is aiding in the final design of the consumer version of the Rift. It has also been suggested that Carbon might be designing an input device for use with the Rift.

Facebook intends to make use of the knowledge of Oculus VR to go beyond the gaming industry by expanding the use of virtual reality in other areas including communications, media and entertainment after it purchased the company for two billion. Oculus has the ability to create the platform more social than ever, and change the way we work, play and communicate.

Image credit: Oculus VR, http://www.oculusvr.com/