Virtual reality Jobs at Apple | Hacker News Reader

Virtual reality Jobs at Apple

jobs.apple.com

84 pointsghosh55 comments

With a capital J in the title, this reads as a really creepy attempt at resurrecting "the leader".

This is what I clicked the linked expecting actually, and now my employer likely thinks I am looking for other work, heh.

Perhaps you'll get a raise in a month or so!

PS. I don't know why i got downvoted, but i let my boss know that i would do some side projects on a freelancer base 4 months ago... 2 Months later, i got an insane raise without asking (+ 40%)

This could be a similar situation :)

That is basically asking for a raise. You increased your flight risk, your boss brought it back down.

You also sent a signal that you aren't making enough money for your desired living standard and a good boss will make sure their employees have enough money so they don't have to worry about financial issues and can focus on the work.

Apple would probably do this in a quite cool way, a bit like Transcendence http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2209764/

0 Jobs found :(

I was also very confused...

This is a good example why I dislike this american style of Capitalize Almost Everything in Titles. We can use bolder and bigger fonts these days to highlight titles.

Reality should have been capitalized or jobs shouldn't have been. The title as written implies Steve Jobs.

Virtual Reality Jobs at Apple

Virtual reality jobs at Apple

As far as I'm aware, British and American conventions are nearly identical.

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/76479/where-can-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_case#Headings_and_publi...

I agree, the weird unconsistent capitalization of titles is pretty bad. The worst I've seen so far here on HN was:

> Yosemite Sends Spotlight, Safari Searches to Apple, Third Parties

But I got downvoted for complaining, so it's apparently pretty clear to others.

I see this problem often with headlines on HN. Title case has one benefit – it reveals that a sentence is a title – but in doing so it makes proper nouns (like Apple's “Jobs”) indistinguishable from other words (like Apple's “jobs”).

On HN, it's obvious that the titles are titles simply because of their location, so title case has no benefit.

But we lose a lot by using title case, because we can't distinguish between “slack” and “Slack,” “flow” and ”Flow,” “wave” and “Wave,” and “medium” and “Medium.”

New words are constantly being added to the list. Every day, many dictionary words are appropriated as new proper nouns, (today, I see that “Lobster” is now a proper noun), so when HN visitors read a headline in title case, they have to consider the possibility that every one of the capitalized words is a proper noun.

But this isn't title case, this is randomly capitalizing the "J" in "Jobs".

Good point. Though I expect it was a blundered attempt at title case.

To me that says the problem isn't with title case but with the names people are picking for their businesses and products.

Yeah totally, I thought they had a virtual Jobs, cracking the whip. This is not the color I asked for! Whip!

I thought exactly that and thought it could be really cool. Like the Michael Jackson and Tupac holograms.

I'll bet anyone $5 that Apple is developing a VR (and/or AR) product for release.

It's not hard to figure out. Tim Cook has been in the media saying (I paraphrase slightly) "wait 'til you see the things we're working on that no-one is talking about yet, tee hee". There are more or less exactly two possibilities here: either Apple has come up with a product of a whole new kind which no-one or almost no-one has thought of before, or it's trying to repeat its Macintosh/iPod/iPhone/iPad trick of taking a product category which people have been talking about and trying to make happen for years and actually releasing a successful, polished product which appeals to consumers. Now, the last time Apple released a genuinely novel product it was HyperCard and Ronald Reagan was president of the USA. (Or arguably it was the Newton, in 1993.)

But gaming? Though iDevices are huge for gaming, you can definitely tell it's not in the company's DNA.

VR isn't necessarily about gaming. Generally there's huge opportunities for novel user interfaces.

The use of "not necessarily" implies that gaming is essential to VR, though.

It just implies that most people think of VR in that context.

Hm, yeah, I agree.

You realise the founders of Apple worked for Atari right? Also, iTunes is one of the biggest markets for games?

Indeed I do, therefore "Though iDevices are huge for gaming...".

I would argue however, that Apple, in stark contrast to Microsoft for instance, is in no way a gaming company. Game Center (which seems unpopular with dedicated gamers) is one of their few forays into the market. Text, photography, industrial design, general UI seems much more of a passion.

It is a muddy area though; Apple has frequently invited game designers on stage at keynotes.

Well, firstly, as Geee said, VR isn't as dominated by gaming as you'd think. Even without getting into novel and unobvious uses of VR, it's an obvious choice for things like inflight entertainment: movies'n'music, picture viewing, even ebook reading. It also has obvious applications for some of Apple's "creative professional" users.

Secondly, Apple is just launching the Apple Watch, despite the fact that the wearables market is not an easy fit for Apple's DNA and public image either. If Apple wants to keep making grand entries into personal-device categories (which evidently it does) then it just has to go where the remaining unentered categories are.

The Apple ecosystem is big enough now that they're probably doing what Microsoft has been doing for the past decade or more. Build OK but average versions of what the competitors are doing because you can drive traffic/sales to them from your existing ecosystem.

Scenekit and Metal both indicate a heavy investment in 3D graphics. VR display technology is a logical next step.

Replace all that C++ crap with Swift, and you have a great rapid game development platform.

I agree. As much as I hate learning a platform-exclusive language I do have to say Swift a pleasure to work with.

They keep putting laptop-grade video cards into all desktops but pricey Mac Pros though.

I recently bought a PC desktop for some Oculus rift coding. Even my cat doesn't wanna hang out too long on top of the machine, that's how hot it gets. I think that burning > 100 watts on a GPU is just not the way to go forward with graphics.

"Replace all that C++ crap with Swift" - for this scenario they need apps that will be actually swift not "Swift".

Really nice find!

As only a single result comes up (and that in the App category), I assume this is just a measure taken by Apple to cover it's bases in case VR takes off (though I'm not sure how iTunes for Occulus Rift is going to work).

But of course, Apple might have an entire hardware/software team poking at VR as we speak, and they're just one guy short.

> ...just a measure taken by Apple to cover it's bases in case VR takes off

I don't think Apple engages in that kind of speculative R&D. It's R&D is directly geared into product development (there are probably arguable edge cases). That's why it's R&D budget is so tiny compared to companies like Googe and Microsoft. I can't see them investing much in a huge, complex and poorly defined area like VR unless thay have some pretty specific ideas in mind.

It's still 4 billion, that's more half a dozen universities (not top tier, but average ones).

Wow you're right, it's shot up a huge amount in the last couple of years! Apple has traditionaly kept a very tight reign on R&D. Frankly it's hard to see how they can expand R&D spending that fast and keep it under tight management control. Interesting.

Could be for accounting reasons though. it might be beneficial to shift some money spent elsewhere into R&D

It's still 4 billion.

"VR" gives two hits, App Engineer and Senior Software Engineer, with "VR/AR development"

Apple has lots of prototypes going on all the time, judging from their myriad patent applications, so this doesn't mean that much, in itself...

But, VR/AR seems the inevitable next step in miniaturization, as the display can be much smaller than a phone or watch etc. So I would be incredulous if Apple wasn't working seriously in this area.

Apple has long been about the user experience. In fact its largely where it derives its competitive advantage. The comments regarding the Occulus Rift or "OR" are largely, I believe, a different area of VR. I cant imagine Apple pursuing a VR-Minecraft path. Rather I think Apple is trying to invent a new method of user input == replacing the KVM. Every other attempt at VR seems like a mere extension or just another thing to plug into a usb port. Apple would be foolish to take this path.

Let the next 5 years of "when is Apple's VR product coming out" hype begin!

at 33 minutes no results are shown for that query. was something interesting taken down?

Still WFM at 0:36.

For anyone who can't see it (try refreshing): http://i.imgur.com/vSvOsHF.png

"Weekly Hours: 40"

With decimals for precision, to boot.

The recruiters sure have a sense of humour.

Interesting. They didn't specify Swift as one of the languages. Probably means nothing. Or...maybe it means the code you write won't be in Swift...for now.

Shouldn't really matter which language, right? How long does swift take to learn really? 2 weeks to produce good stuff 4 to be near flawless? From scratch, 3d Graphics mathematics, pixel shaders, graphics card hacks and other algorithms might take a year or two or more.

Spooky, huh, this white silence.

iOS on the oculus? the Apple Rift? (is facebook selling?)

No. Not likely. No.

Is there any problem for porting Occulus Rift to iOS similarly of what they have done with Samsung devices ? I mean except some exclusivity contract with Samsung I can't find a reason why it couldn't work on iOS.

Even John Carmack would be more pleased to develop for iOS instead of Android.

VR is not sexy. At all.

I 'm not so sure about that http://www.reddit.com/r/oculusnsfw

Is the paycheck also virtual?

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