Oculus to Acquire Carbon Design Team | Hacker News Reader

Oculus to Acquire Carbon Design Team

oculusvr.com

112 pointsGraffitiTim49 comments

Great for Carbon. The situation for hardware design firms (right now, and often) is brutal - the degree of difficulty to consistently book enough new work to keep your talented team members employed is incredibly high, and more companies are moving this work in-house.

There are a number of these firms in the Seattle area, and all of them are struggling. Acquisition is often preferable to closing your doors, which could well be what happens to others.

Can I ask what your connection to the industry is?

An Oculus controller to go with the headset is looking more and more likely. I'm guessing that it will be similar to the PlayStation Move controller but with infrared instead of visible light tracking. They're already doing infrared tracking for the headset, so it would be easy to track a couple of controllers as well.

Not necessarily. Most people are going have the headset hooked up at a desk because that's where the computer lives, so you'd need a really big field of view to see hands while seated up close to the desk. My webcam sees my face reliably, but it definitely doesn't see my hands.

Additionally, controllers that you wave around don't do well with blindness to your surroundings. If they make a controller I'd expect it to be more similar to Razer's Hydra, though hopefully cheaper.

If they were going to do a magnetically tracked controller like the Razer Hydra they would have bought Sixense by now, or at least partnered with them. I'm pretty sure they're not going to do that. They want sub-millimeter absolute tracking accuracy and magnetic tracking can't deliver that.

I hope not, everybody's doing that. They should make affordable VR gloves.

Someone's already on it: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/controlvr/control-vr-mo...

Gloves are a possibility, but pure gesture input just doesn't work (as repeatedly demonstrated with Wii, Kinect, and Leap Motion). Whatever they release, it needs to have at least a few buttons and probably an analog stick or two.

All those systems can't deal with self-occlusion of the fingers but gloves can deal with it. Also, the gloves can be out of sight of the user (hands behind the back)and still be effective.

    pure gesture input just doesn't work (as repeatedly demonstrated with Wii, Kinect, and Leap Motion)

That's just untrue. I'm not saying that, from a gameplay-oriented perspective, gestures are better/more adapted (which is definitely wrong to say at the moment anyway). But for a data visualization and/or 3d world manipulation use, gestures are really promising.

The devices themselves and their lack of general use don't prove anything: The Wii and Kinect don't track the fingers, and the Leap Motion is a lot more spatially restricted (which might bring incomfort after prolonged use, and is unpractical for wide movements). Besides, developping new ways of interacting reliably with gestures is not something you can do in an afternoon, so it might take time for pure gesture input to prove its worth.

A wireless version of the Peregrine glove would fit:

http://theperegrine.com

But the gloves don't fully reflect the positions of each of the fingers. It only senses when the touch points on the glove are being contacted. I couldn't flip the bird at someone in VR, for example.

since the oculus already tracks its own position in space, a controller would really only need to know position relative to the headset, something like a front / down facing Leap motion (with minimal lag?) could do wonders for VR presence

Why is it said that Oculus acquired them, instead of Facebook? Doesn't Oculus not really exist anymore (as a company)?

Since they operate independently and likely have their own cash pile for stuff like this, the legal entity making the purchase is actually Oculus. Same with like Nest/Google AFAIK.

I wondered the same thing about Nest/Google the other day.

It could also be an abstraction on the part of Google/Facebook to hide their associations with the brand, to avoid brand reputation damage of some sort.

Facebook is taking this holding-company approach to WhatsApp, Instagram and Oculus. Unilever, P&G and Nestle should be wary of another holding company controlling their customer channel, especially after the Axciom partnership which gives Facebook access to the _offline_ purchases of Facebook customers. The consumer goods companies should fund new social networks, to diversify their online reach.

http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-and-acxioms-big-data...

"Audience Operating System .. allows advertisers to tie together your "digital persona" even if you've changed your name due to marriage, the use of a nickname, or because you sometimes use a middle name. It also figures out whether someone who has moved addresses or changed phone numbers is the same person or not."

So Facebook are profiling everyone to an ever more extreme degree; soon Facebook will tell you what you want and you'll like it or else :-)

So why would Oculus acquire Carbon Design, rather than contracting them to design/build their products?

Because they've already been using them as a contractor* and decided it would make sense to bring them in-house full-time.

* "We’ve been working with Carbon for nearly a year on multiple unannounced projects."

You are basically paying to grow a competitor if you outsource high skilled work. Strategically it's better to control all knowledge/resources that your company is dependent on.

Apparently ASUS started selling computers after Dell outsourced a bit too much to them.

http://www.asymco.com/2012/12/07/the-real-threat-that-samsun...

Didn't the same situation happen with Sony and Samsung in electronics?

They're considering a whole family of products to allow you to interact with the virtual world?

Guns, gloves, vests that make you feel like you've been hit, chairs that make you feel like you're accelerating, rotating seats like NASA uses at Space Camp, etc.

EDIT: Walking platforms like the Virtuix Omni, force-feedback devices, scents, and on and on...

Why would a company hire an employee rather than contracting them out to do the same work?

Bingo. User Bane understands why:)

Because you think you'll continue needing the service the employee provides in relative perpetuity.

Did you just contract out your answer to bane?

He only needed the answer once -- so a pretty smart move :)

It's possible that in working with Carbon they were bleeding trade secrets and knowhow, and they might have noticed competitors starting to engage Carbon.

Perhaps because they'd like exclusive use of their services?

So Carbon Design is now the Occulus Bellevue office, or did Occulus already have an office there?

Carbon is in North Seattle next to UW. Oculus was already building up an R&D team in Redmond.

I think it is pretty safe to assume they're working on hardware to compliment the Oculus headset; gloves, a controller and or other accessories perhaps a full body suit comprised of sensors to map body movement.

I am well and truly excited for the future of virtual reality, Oculus are definitely at the forefront of greatness here.

How does Oculus acquire anything at this point. Don't they mean Facebook acquires Carbon?

Yeah, although the scope of the acquisition is currently limited to the scope of Oculus ("operating independently") within Facebook. I've also seen announcements regarding PayPal acquiring companies even though PayPal is a subsidiary of eBay Inc.

If Oculus is into acquisitions, it'd be cool to see them acquire Oblong, to add some UI & interaction technology.

I hope they make affordable VR gloves.

I wonder if tactile VR gloves will be reality soon. I'd imagine that there will be some tiny nano linings inside the glove that could be controlled digitally, which would create a tactile sensation, such as holding a gun or a steering wheel.

Moving on from just hand gloves, we could even produce g-force enducing hydraulic chair, for example, when a car accelerates inside the game, the chair would lean you back, causing you to feel gravity pulling you back to the ground, when inside the game, it would feel like you were being thrust backwards to your seats.

I keep thinking the long term goal here is not an Oculus Rift product, but devices that tie in augmented reality and marketing / sales, with hooks to your Facebook account. I honestly see them ditching anything to do with a game display device.

How does that follow at all from the blog post? I'm no fan of Oculus being purchased (at all), but what in a product design team joining Oculus suggests any "long term goal here" about devices for marketing, sales, or hooks to your Facebook account, let alone ditching a game display device?

I think the far more likely reading is that they know the device sitting on your face is make or break for a VR device hitting the mainstream, and they have the chance here to basically define what a VR display is for the next 10 or 20 years if they do it right (the evolution of game controllers is actually a great analog of this).

We can speculate about a Google Glass competitor, and certainly the market would react to a prediction of that, but step 1 is getting people to put something on their face.

Oh my God I thought these bullshit cries of doom stopped. It's such a simple matter of business. If Oculus did that, no one would by a Rift. That would be bad for Oculus, Facebook, and consumers. The much more likely thing to result from the Facebook buyout is they use their $2B to build a better product and market it better to compete against new behemoths butting in the VR marketplace like Sony and others that are surely about to jump on the bandwagon. That would be good for the consumers, and thusly good for Oculus and Facebook. There are literally zero good reasons Facebook would ram down tacky social media bullshit onto the Rift. That's bad design, bad business, and no one would like it.

Isn't rabid Facebook hating getting old now?

I think characterizing discussion of the effects of facebook on oculus as 'Facebook hating' is a pretty cheap dodge of a significant event. A lot of the strategy changes people are making around the facebook purchase are legitimate ones based on reasonable observations of facebook. It's a terrible thing for those of us who were really excited about oculus for so long, but things changed and a reasonable discussion is going to happen.

I think that the argument that facebook adding "tacky social media" components to oculus would be bad for business is incorrect. Facebook has done quite well with the model, as their company shows.

For many of us, we realize that facebook will likely succeed with oculus in some way. It will just be a different kind of party than we want to go to, is all.

Not on this site, unfortunately. I expect HN to be as even-handed on Facebook as Republicans are on Democrats.

Can you provide some insights on what made you think like that? I, too, had this bad feeling when Zuck made the announcement but other than Facebook and Oculus VR doing business on practically unrelated areas there is nothing to be pessimistic about it, especially Facebook's track record of buyout aftermaths, which mostly they let people do their own things.

Knowledge gained working with a renderer and two screens can be used with camera(s) and one screen, such as what a cellphone/tablet/computer has.

I don't know exactly how you meant 'two screens' (two experienced screens, or two hardware screens?), but in case you meant the latter, there is only one screen.

https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Oculus+Rift+Teardown/13682

Let's say two vantage points, then.

That must suck so bad for these designers... one day you're a hot industrial designer, and the next you're working for facebook.

You can make the best designs ever, but if there is just suck inside, your design sucks in a way too.

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