Some of the most influential advances in theatrical projection — including Dolby Atmos sound and a trio of digital laser projectors from Barco, Christie and IMAX — are among the 16 achievements honored this year with the Academy of Motion Picture Awards and the Academy of Motion Picture Awards and Scientific and Technical Awards of Science. Contributions to motion pictures.
The ceremony, hosted by Natasha Lyonne, was held on Friday at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures’ David Geffen Theater, followed by a party at the museum’s Fanny Restaurant. Scientific and engineering awards (Academy Plaques) were presented to Charles Q. Robinson, Nicholas Tsingos, Christophe Chapin, Mark Fenton and the Cinema Audio Group team at Dolby for their then-launched 2012 Dolby Atmos immersive cinema sound system. The newly named Dolby Theater in Hollywood. Today, there are an estimated 8,000 Dolby Atmos-equipped cinemas around the world.
Also honored were the developers of three laser projectors – digital cinema projectors that use laser light to enhance brightness and contrast compared to previous xenon lamp technology. Academy plaques were presented to Michael Perkins, Jeroen Damberg, Trevor Davies, and Martin J. Richards for the Christie E3LH Dolby Vision HDR cinema display system, a collaboration between the Dolby and Christie engineering teams; Steve Reed 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 in the form of academic certificates – were given to several honorees for technology that contributed to the shift toward laser projection. This included Bill Beck for the use of semiconductor lasers; Gregory T. Niven for laser diodes; and Yoshitaka Nakatsu, Yuji Nagao, Tsuyoshi Hirao, Tomonori Morizumi, and Kazuma Kozuru for laser diodes.
During the ceremony, developers participating in open source software projects were also honored. They included science and engineering award recipients Ken Moseth, Peter Kuka, and Mihai Aldin for their contributions to the open source OpenVDB VFX software; And F. Sebastian Gracia, Alex Mohr, Sonia Bonaterra, Brett Levin, and Jeremy Cowles for Pixar’s open source global landscape description framework.
Completing the science and engineering award winners was Jaden Oh, who accepted the honor for his Marvelous Designer digital clothing design system.
Technical Achievement Award recipients include Jeff Light, Dan Bailey, and Nick Avramosis for their work on OpenVDB; Lucas Miller, Christopher John Horvath, Steve Lavitis and Joe Ardent for the open source Alembic CG exchange system; Oliver Castle, Marcus Shaw, and Keith Lackey for their work describing the Atlas landscape; and James Eagleton and Delwyn Holroyd for the High Density Encryption (HDE) lossless compression algorithm within the Codex recording system.
Technical Achievement Awards were also given to technology developers who were credited with advancing production and safety capabilities. Arnold Peterson, Ilya B. Popov, and John Frazier were honored for the blind driver’s roof compartment used in stunt driving; and John G. Bilyeu, for Movie Works cable cutters.