Research Scientist Intern, Audio User Experience (PhD)

Job description

The Meta Reality Labs Research Team brings together a world-class team of researchers, developers, and engineers to create the future of virtual and augmented reality, which together will become as universal and essential as smartphones and personal computers are today. In particular, the Meta Reality Labs Research Audio team is focused on two goals: creating virtual sounds that are perceptually indistinguishable from reality, and redefining human hearing. These two initiatives will allow us to connect people by letting them feel together despite being physically apart, and to converse in even the most difficult listening environments. We are seeking interns to help us understand, in depth and in context, how future users make sense of and live with these audio technologies — what they notice, what they struggle to describe, and what matters to them in their own words. This role requires a background in psychology, cognitive science, anthropology, sociology, communication, human-computer interaction, human factors, or a similar field. Successful candidates will have strong skills in qualitative human subjects research, with an interest in how people emotionally experience audio, how immersion and presence feel from the inside, and how those experiences are remembered and recounted afterward. Relevant methods include in-depth and elicitation interviewing, diary and longitudinal studies, contextual inquiry, field and in-home research, think-aloud protocols, and interpretive analysis of rich experiential data. Our internships are twelve (12) to twenty-four (24) weeks long and we have various start dates throughout the year. Specific projects will be designed in collaboration with successful applicants to align the intern's skills and experience with current research needs.