In 2016 I started at Meta (well, it was Facebook then), coming onboard to manage the nascent VR sound design team.
The team was growing quickly, and AR sound design was just starting up, too -- I knew these endeavors could be aligned. I also knew that we'd benefit from partnering up more closely with the awesome Oculus sound team.
So I created the Immersive Sound Design group to consolidate all these efforts.
At Meta, the Sound Design discipline is a centralized resource for the whole company, meaning it is engaged on every platform and in nearly every product that has any sort of sound.
The Immersive Sound Design team focused on augmented reality, virtual reality, mixed reality, spatialized sound, and emerging technologies across the entire family of apps: Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Oculus, Portal, Ray-Ban, Spark, and Reality Labs.
I led and managed this group, and grew it to more than 40 sound designers, implementers, coders, composers, voice designers, producers, managers, and QA specialists.
We worked on a vast portfolio, providing design and technology for products ranging from First Steps, to Story Time; from Facebook 360 to AR productions for Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger Kids. We supported Horizon Venues and Haim in AR. We helped create convincing remote presence experiences in a Dead and Buried arena, and meetings in Workrooms virtual offices.
We even took Spark to Abbey Road.
Immersive Sound Design helped host an Abbey Road Red hackathon.
And there were dozens more.
Immersive Sound represeting at the Emmy Awards.
We supported the development of the hardware, too, including the Oculus/Meta Quest series, the (lamented and underappreciated) Portal, and the Ray-Ban smart glasses, creating the native sound sets, and consulting on sonic capabilities, hardware specs, and SDK expectations. We performed extensive listening tests and provided effective, actionable results.
During this time, I helped spec and design Meta's flagship audio facility, working closely with Sound Design leadership, the architects, and the facilities team during the initial stages of the project.
Atmos control room at Meta's flagship studio.
You can see the Atmos control room, the music tracking and mixing rooms, and the foley stage in some scenes in this fun video:
Behind-the-scenes of our work on the awesome Sk8 Chickens project.