Meet Tech Oscar winner Parag Havaldar, an IITian whose Technology is being used to create real animated characters in Hollywood movies

An Indian American Parag Havaldar, who graduated from IIT-Kharagpur in 1991 with a degree in computer science and engineering, has won the Oscar for technical achievement.

This Oscar is conferred by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in recognition of original developments that has resulted in significant improvements in motion picture production and exhibition.

Parag was seen as the rightful owner of this award because of the development of expression-based facial performance-capture technology at Sony Pictures Imageworks by him.

“This year we are particularly pleased to be able to honor not only a wide range of new technologies, but also the pioneering digital cinema cameras that helped facilitate the widespread conversion to electronic image capture for motion picture production,” Ray Feeney, Academy Award recipient and chair of the Scientific and Technical Awards Committee, said.

“With their outstanding, innovative work, these technologists, engineers and inventors have significantly expanded filmmakers’ creative choices for moving image storytelling,” he added.

A software supervisor at Sony Pictures Imageworks, Havaldar leads the team in the area of performance capture. The technology developed by him and his team has been used to create stylized character animations. Parag is also a part-time teacher of multimedia at University of Southern California, from where he pursued his PhD in computer vision and graphics in 1996.

His expertise has helped create stylised and realistic character animations in a variety of movies including “Alice in Wonderland”, “Monster House”, “Hancock” and “Spiderman”, "Watchmen", "Green Lantern", "Beowulf".

The Academy webpage reads, "This pioneering system has enabled large-scale use of animation rig-based facial performance-capture for motion pictures, combining solutions for tracking, stabilization, solving and animator controllable curve editing."

The awards will be handed out on February 11 in Beverly Hills, ahead of the main Oscar ceremony to held on February 26.