Mach1, a sound technology and IP development studio focused on VR, AR and other interactive mediums, was honored at the Advanced Imaging Society’s 2018 Lumiere Tech Awards last week (12/13) in Beverly Hills. Also recognized during the award proceedings were such industry stalwarts as DreamWorks Animation, Nvidia and IBM Watson.

“The Mach1 Spatial System was iterated on some of Hollywood’s most high profile VR titles so we are grateful to be recognized by the AIS as this industry demanded an accurate total spatial audio solution, for a medium where sound is critical for immersion, and we built that system,” said Mach1 CEO and co-founder Jacqueline Bošnjak .

Mach1’s high profile VR & AR titles include 20th Century Fox’s The Martian VR and Alien VR; Lockheed Martin’s The Mars VR Bus; Oculus Story Studio’s Emmy-nominated Dear Angelica; FX’s  Mr. Robot VR; Microsoft Hololen’s Legion: Sessions for FX; Sony’s Passengers VR; The Last Goodbye VR, the first VR testimony; SyFy’s NightFlyer; and immersive theatre VR experience Chained: A Victorian Nightmare.

Mach1 founder and audio director Dražen Bošnjak added: “It is a great honor to receive the Lumiere Awards in the company of brands we admire like Apple, DreamWorks, IBM, The Mill,  and Felix and Paul. Our passion is to move the needle and to nudge the future development of immersive audio. To challenge the existing approach and quality and to create innovative techniques for high quality 3DOF and 6DOF audio production. One of our goals is to preserve already existing audio practices and quality expectations that have been staples of film and music sound production for decades. We want to embrace new technologies but we also want to preserve any superior sounding techniques and technologies and bring them into this new computing platform we are creating”. 

The AIS Technology Award program annually acknowledges and celebrates technologies and processes demonstrating both innovation and impact in advancing the future of the entertainment and media industries including but not limited to theatrical, television broadcast, video, virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, stereoscopic 3D, themed attractions, and other forms of relevant content.

This year’s ceremony recognized 15 technologies and their developers:

• Apple ProRes Raw codec
• IBM Watson computer incorporating AI
• DreamWorks Animation’s VDM data structure system
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX graphics cards
• Google VR
• Cisco’s broadcast production virtualization system
• Felix and Paul’s dynamic projection workflow for stereoscopic 360-degree live video
• USC Institute for Creative Technologies’ HDR-image based lighting
• The Mill’s Mascot real-time animation system
• Mach 1’s Spatial System: workflow & Mach1 Spatial Format.
• MTT Innovations’ HDR light-steering cinema projector
• Positron’s Voyager chair for immersive experiences
• RYOT’s Yahoo Mail AR
• Secret Location’s Vuser Spark technology for content rights management
• Survios’ Electronauts VR music creation tool