At the beginning of the month, MBW broke the news that Sony Music is hiring for a team ‘dedicated to reimagining music through immersive media’ using Fortnite maker Epic Games‘ Unreal Engine.
Unreal is the ‘engine’ on which a number of blockbuster video games, including Epic‘s own Fortnite, are built on.
Now, according to several jobs ads spotted by MBW this week, another company that’s playing an increasingly prominent role in the music business – ByteDance-owned video platform TikTok – is also hiring for software engineers with experience in immersive design and games development.
For example, TikTok is hiring for Gameplay Engineers, whose work, according to the ad, “will be experienced by hundreds of millions of Tiktok users around the world.”
Other roles currently advertised by TikTok include a Tech Lead Interactive Engineer who will need 5+ years’ experience in immersive design and engineering, real-time graphics rendering, or gameplay development, and a Creative AR Design Engineer, who requires 3+ years’ experience in immersive design and engineering, real-time graphics rendering, or gameplay development.
And guess what? One of the preferred skills for all of these roles is a “solid background in designing, programming, and prototyping using real-time 3D engines”, including but not limited to… Epic’s Unreal.
According to the ads, these individuals will join the TikTok AR Effect team and “will create innovative augmented reality effects and experiences on mobile devices for TikTok”.
What is the TikTok AR Effect? According to a recent report by Digiday, it’s a brand new augmented reality advertising format.
This new feature, according to DigiDay’s report, “will allow TikTok users to add interactive visual effects from advertisers to their TikTok videos that interact with the physical environment around them”.
Users will be able to click the ads, which will include music played while the videos are shot.
Citing people familiar with matter, the report adds that the product, currently called the “AR brand effect”, is due to be launched globally in Q3 2020 and that the name might change by then.
As noted by Digiday, TikTok’s new AR ad format will be competing with the likes of Instagram’s Augmented Reality filters and Snapchat’s Lenses.
“We’re experimenting with ways we can continue making this a valuable experience for brands, and will share more details when we have them.”
TikTok
In a statement issued to Digiday, a TikTok spokesperson, said: “We’re always exploring new ways to bring creativity and joy to our community. Creative effects are a fun way for our users to express themselves and for brands to bring an interactive element to their campaigns with branded creative effects.”
“We’re experimenting with ways we can continue making this a valuable experience for brands, and will share more details when we have them.”
This week, we reported that Bytedance has poached Disney’s Kevin Mayer to become TikTok’s new CEO
TikTok has been downloaded more than 2 billion times globally (on the App Store and Google Play), according to Sensor Tower estimates.Music Business Worldwide
