And the Oscar goes to . . .

Scientific and Technical Award (Scientific and Engineering Award). To Stephen Regelous for the design and development of Massive, the autonomous agent animation system used for the battle sequences in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Massive takes a new approach in simulating behaviors of large numbers of computer-generated extras a.k.a. “agents.” Each “agent” contains a primitive software “brain” used to develop behavioral rules simulating a wide range of behaviors. In The Lord of the Rings trilogy, over 200,000 agents were controlled in several scenes.