We discovered late last year that Apple was hiring software engineers with experience in virtual reality gaming and user interfaces, but new job listings this week point to Apple’s interest in the development of hardware for virtual reality.
Apple is seeking a Senior Display Systems Engineer for “display systems design and development related to VR environments.” More specifically, Apple is looking for someone experienced in monitor and projection technologies to help it with “extremely high fidelity VR environments.” From the job listing:
-Specify and test novel display systems for virtual environments. -Work with vendors to develop custom display solutions. -Design and select appropriate hardware and software components to optimize fidelity in a variety of VR environments -Develop software to support displaying rendered image sequences on the display hardware. -Work closely with software, electrical and mechanical engineers during testing and integration.
A second job listing posted by Apple this week is seeking a Senior Display Software Engineer to support graphics software engineering efforts for VR environments. The engineer will “own the display pipeline from rendered image sequences to display hardware.”
The job listing also mentions “Experience with motion capture systems,” which immediately makes us think of the acquisition of PrimeSense Apple made back in 2013, the company originally behind the sensor’s used in Microsoft’s Kinect.
Late last year Apple posted job listings looking for app engineers to work on virtual reality and augmented reality experiences. We mentioned at the time that Apple has its own patent for a virtual reality headset that’s not unlike products currently on the market such asGoogle’s recently launched Cardboard experiment, Pinc, and Samsung’s Gear VR. Earlier this month the company was granted that patent (pictured above).
While the job listings for app engineers were looking for those experienced with Oculus Rift and other VR hardware, these new job listings are the first hint that Apple might be looking into developing hardware for the experience too.
