Audio for 360° video and VR experiences – Apple job postings
More from Apple’s job site. This time signs that they are looking to develop features for their applications, OSes and hardware to support spatial audio. Spatial audio allows creators to define soundscapes in terms of the relative position of sound sources to listeners. This means that if I hear someone start talking to my left, if I turn towards them, the sound should seem to come from what I’m looking at – from the front. Useful for 360° spherical audio, fully-interactive VR and experiences plus future OS user interfaces.
At the moment there are four relevant vacancies:
Apple Hardware Engineering is looking for a Audio Experience & Prototyping Engineer:
Apple’s Technology Development Group is looking for an Audio Experience and Prototyping Engineer to help prototype and define new audio UI/UX paradigms. This engineer will work closely with the acoustic design, audio software, product design, experience prototyping, and other teams to guide the future of Apple’s audio technology and experience The ideal candidate will have a background in spatial audio experience design (binaural headphone rendering, HOA, VBAP), along with writing audio supporting software and plugins.
Experience in the following strongly preferred:
- Sound design for games or art installations
- Writing apps using AVAudioEngine
- Swift / Objective-C / C++
- Running DAW software such as Logic, ProTools, REAPER, etc.
Closer to post production, Apple’s Interactive Media Group Core Audio team is looking for a Spatial Audio Software Engineer to work in Silicon Valley:
IMG’s Core Audio team provides audio foundation for various high profile features like Siri, phone calls, Face Time, media capture, playback, and API’s for third party developers to enrich our platforms. The team is looking for talented engineers who are passionate about building audio software products for millions of customers and care about overall user experience. You will be pushing the boundaries of spatial audio experience for future technologies.
- Key Advantage : Experience with audio engines that are part of Digital Audio Workstations or Game audio systems
- Advantage : Experience with Spatial audio formats (Atmos, HOA etc) is desirable.
I gather that the Logic Pro digital audio workstation team are based in Germany. Apple are also looking for a Spatial Audio Software Engineer to work in Berlin.
For iOS and macOS, Apple are also looking for a Core Audio Software Engineer in Zurich:
The team is looking for talented engineers who are passionate about building audio software products for millions of customers and care about overall user experience. You will be pushing the boundaries of spatial audio experience for future technologies.
If you think this kind of activity is too little too late, there was at least one vacancy for a Spatial Audio Software Engineer back in July 2017.
Although Apple explore many technical directions for products that never see the light of day, I expect that spatial audio has a good future at Apple.