Meet Kiran Bhat: The Oscar-winning tech wiz from Coimbatore

Kiran Bhat, an Indian American hailing from Coimbatore, is a recipient of the prestigious Technical Achievement Award  Receiving this award, Bhat becomes the eight Indian to receive the Oscar Award. The photoreal facial animation was also used in other Hollywood movies like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Warcraft, Pirates of the Caribbean,  Star Wars Episode VII and Star Wars Rogue One.

If you’ve watched some of the Hollywood blockbusters in recent years, you’ve almost surely seen Bhat’s work. Hats off to Kiran and his former colleagues at the Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), who digitally-created characters like The Hulk in 'The Avengers' or Grand Moff Tarkin in 'Star Wars: Rogue One.' 

Kiran Bhat along with his team at the ILM developed the facial performance-capture system. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, recently, announced a list of 18 technical and scientific achievements representing 34 individual award recipients and five organisations, in which two Indian American engineers, Kiran Bhat and Parag Havaldar were selected. 

On February 11, he will receive the awards at the Beverly Hills. These awards will hold a special value in India.

But, do you know who is Kiran Bhat and what is this facial performance-capture system?

1) Kiran Bhat is currently residing in San Francisco, California.

2) He has also built technology for creating personalised and 3D digital avatars from pictures that can be plugged into games, movies, social virtual reality and e-commerce.

3) Kiran along with his team from ILM developed the facial performance-capture system.

4) He is an alumnus of Stanes Anglo Indian School in Coimbatore

5) Kiran went on to do his double degree in EEE and Mechanical Engineering at BITS Pilani. He has also done PhD in robotics and artificial intelligence from the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburg.

Where can you see the use of this facial performance-capture system? 

According to the reports, this system allows high-fidelity facial performance transfer from actors to digital characters in large-scale productions while maintaining full creative control, and integrates stable rig-based solving and the resolution of secondary detail in a controllable pipeline.

In an interview with a daily, Kiran said, "This was first used in Avengers for the character of Hulk, in which, we captured the expressions of Mark Ruffalo. A helmet fit with two cameras was placed on Ruffalo's head when he acted on the set. With this, we transferred Ruffalo's expressions into the digital character."

The photoreal facial animation was also used in other Hollywood movies like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Warcraft, Pirates of the Caribbean,  Star Wars Episode VII and Star Wars Rogue One.

Kiran also added, "We sought the help from Guy Henry, who studied Peter Cushing's work. He enacted like him and we captured his expressions." 

Ever since the announcement, his Facebook has been abuzz with congratulatory messages for Kiran Bhat.