Some influential developments in theatrical exhibition—including Dolby Atmos sound and a trio of digital laser projectors from Barco, Christie and IMAX–are among the 16 achievements that were honored this year with the Academy of Motion Picture Awards and Sciences’ Scientific and Technical Awards for contributions to motion pictures.
The ceremony, hosted by Natasha Lyonne, was held Friday at the David Geffen Theater of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, followed by a party at Fanny’s restaurant in the museum. Scientific and Engineering Awards (Academy Plaques) were presented to Charles Q. Robinson, Nicolas Tsingos, Christophe Chabanne, Mark Vinton and the Cinema Audio Group team at Dolby for its object-based Dolby Atmos immersive cinema sound system that launched in 2012 at the then newly-named Dolby Theatre in Hollywood. Today there are an estimated 8,000 Dolby Atmos-capable cinema auditoriums around the world.
The developers of three laser projectors—digital cinema projectors that use laser light to boost brightness and contrast compared with earlier xenon lamp technology—were also recognized. Academy Plaques were presented to Michael Perkins, Gerwin Damberg, Trevor Davies and Martin J. Richards for the Christie E3LH Dolby Vision HDR cinema projection system, which is a collaboration between Dolby and Christie’s engineering teams; Steve Read and Barry Silverstein, for the IMAX Prismless laser projector; and Peter Janssens, Goran Stojmenovik and Wouter D’Oosterlinck, for the Barco RGB laser projector.
Technical Achievement Awards—presented as Academy Certificates—were given to several honorees for tech that contributed to the shift toward laser projection. That included Bill Beck for the use of semiconductor lasers; Gregory T. Niven for laser diodes; and Yoshitaka Nakatsu, Yoji Nagao, Tsuyoshi Hirao, Tomonori Morizumi and Kazuma Kozuru for laser diodes.
Developers involved in open-source software projects were also recognized during the ceremony. Among them were Scientific and Engineering Award recipients Ken Museth, Peter Cucka and Mihai Aldén for contributions to the open-source OpenVDB VFX software; and F. Sebastian Grassia, Alex Mohr, Sunya Boonyatera, Brett Levin and Jeremy Cowles for Pixar’s Universal Scene Description open-source framework.
Rounding out the Scientific and Engineering Award recipients was Jaden Oh, who accepted this honor for the Marvelous Designer digital clothing creation system.
Technical Achievement Award recipients included Jeff Lait, Dan Bailey and Nick Avramoussis for work on OpenVDB; Lucas Miller, Christopher Jon Horvath, Steve LaVietes and Joe Ardent for the open-source Alembic CG interchange system; Oliver Castle, Marcus Schoo and Keith Lackey for their work on the Atlas scene description framework; and James Eggleton and Delwyn Holroyd for the High-Density Encoding (HDE) lossless compression algorithm within the Codex recording system.
Technical Achievement Awards were also bestowed on developers of tech that are credited for advancing both production capabilities and safety. Arnold Peterson, Elia P. Popov and John Frazier were honored for the Blind Driver Roof Pod used in stunt driving; and Jon G. Belyeu, for the Movie Works cable cutter devices.
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