Stockholm, Sweden - Peder Norrby of Trapcode, developer of visual effects and motion graphics tools, has presented Ken Perlin with the Trapcode Award of Excellence.
This reward also includes $10,000 in prize money. The ceremony was held in New York University on April 23 in the main lecture hall of the Warren Weaver building.
Trapcode presented Ken Perlin the Award of Excellence for his genius algorithm called Perlin Noise, which Perlin published for the public. This code produces pseudo-random numbers that are useful in computer graphics for creating clouds, fog, smoke, and organic-looking textures and shapes. The code has been incorporated in Trapcode products Shine, Particular, and the soon-to-be-released product, Trapcode Flux. Effects generated by these software applications can be seen in feature films and TV shows, such as Matrix Revolutions, The Day After Tomorrow, Sin City, and CSI Miami.
Ken Perlin is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at New York University. His research interests include graphics, animation, user interfaces, science education, and multimedia. In January 2004, Perlin was the featured artist at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 2002, he received the NYC Mayor's award for excellence in Science and Technology and the Sokol award for outstanding Science faculty at NYU. In 1997, Perlin won an Academy Award for Technical Achievement from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his noise and turbulence procedural texturing techniques, which are widely used in feature films and television. In 1991, he received a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation.