The world's most valuable EV maker, Tesla, is seemingly in the process of building out a team which can potentially make video games, work on user interfaces and develop software for the same. Tesla has a job listing painted out on its website for positions in its Austin facility, US, where they have a Gigafactory under construction.
First reported by Electrek, it seems like Tesla is building a dedicated software team whose work is quite unrelated to the work that will be under the ambit of the Gigafactory. It is likely the manufacturer is working on new car infotainment system software which is why they need UI designers, software developers and video game developers for making cool experiences for their future vehicles.
One job listing makes it quite clear that Tesla is toying with the idea of creating video games for its in-car infotainment system.
"Tesla strives to make its cars the most fun possible; bringing video game experiences to the car helps increase that fun. In this incredibly rare opportunity to help build a video games platform, we are looking for a highly motivated software engineer to help enable the best video game content to be available in-car. Come put that industry experience to great use and help us build this platform," reads the job listing.
It is no secret that Tesla has been building the Tesla Arcade platform for which it has a team in Bellevue, Washington. This team will likely redouble or augment those efforts considering that it has also been courting video game studios.
Seemingly, this effort is quite advanced as the job listing is also for someone with experiences with rendering engines like the Unreal engine, Open GL and Direct X technologies. These are technologies which are used by some of the most sophisticated video games.
'We are looking for a motivated real-time rendering engineer to help us advance the software infotainment system in our cars. We are aiming to build the world's best in-car experience by taking full advantage of our 17-inch display, graphics hardware, and recent advances in features. The ideal candidate is self-driven and looks forward to solving challenging problems. In-car graphics relies heavily on rendering technologies like OpenGL. The ideal candidate is an expert with OpenGL/DirectX and can use it to create real-time rendering techniques such as deferred rendering, HDR, ambient-occlusion, particle systems for snow, rain, etc. We are looking for engineers that can write rendering engines like Unreal, not simply those engineers that use them as a black box," reads the job listing.
Tesla is looking to make quite a sophisticated video game platform within its cars. Now, this may seem dangerous considering cars are meant to be driven, but Tesla has been talking a big game about its self-driving technology and soon, its AutoPilot technology is said to get a huge boost from the Dojo supercomputer.
This would make the cabin a rather boring place at times which is why it would make sense for Tesla to build a sophisticated interactive entertainment platform within the vehicles. The Tesla's don't have any dearth of horsepower when it comes to on-board computing which is why they can actually have graphically intensive games running on the infotainment system. In the coming years, 5G and cloud gaming services will anyway make mobile gaming richer and more pervasive in cars.
