About the role
:
You will be working closely within a small project team consisting of artists, a psychologist and AI researchers in an iterative development cycle. You will be responsible for the VR development part and map detected emotion to visual animations using blend trees and procedural animation. You will also create UI elements and interactions between vocal input and visual output to appeal to singers and non-singers.
You will use your programming skills and Unity experience to integrate AI models that detect and tag emotional meaning from audio and map these to steer real-time visuals in Unity. Live audio features will also be mapped to animate graphics. Working closely together with the project lead, you will create a system where the shapes are animated differently depending on which emotion the system detects. Image synthesis, procedural content generation and style transfer will further expand on a bank of 3D graphics that are created specifically for this project. The ideal candidate will have experience with the wider pipeline, including asset generation, rigging and animating. You will also be involved in some of the evaluation work for this project.
The job will be for 2.5 days per week (0.5 FT) on a fixed-term basis for 8 months. The working pattern will be on-campus with some remote working possible depending on project stage. The days and hours to work can be negotiated with the successful candidate.
About you:
Key skills:
1. A good understanding of programming within the Unity games engine using C# and experience with VR application development.
Essential skills and experience:
2. A degree in computer science, software engineering or a similar technical field, or equivalent professional experience
3. Experience developing projects with C#
4. Hands-on experience developing VR/XR applications using Unity
5. Proficiency with scripting for procedural animation generation
6. Experience with image and/or audio-based projects
7. Experience with real-time system optimisation (e.g. low-latency audio/visual feedback in VR)
8. Experience with working in interdisciplinary teams
9. Excellent communication and interpersonal skills.
10. Creative problem-solving skills
11. Self-motivation and able to undertake independent research related to the brief
12. Excellent ability to work to deadlines
Desirable:
13. A relevant postgraduate qualification.
14. Experience with bringing Python models into Unity
15. Proficiency with Autodesk Maya modelling, skinning and rigging
16. Experience with writing and co-writing research papers
17. Sensitive to nuances in visual aesthetics