Into the picture arrives the hero – a cowboy sheriff made of plastic and fabric with a pull-string to make him speak. The sheriff casts a shadow over the villainous potato who flees from the law.
It’s a scene plucked from a child’s imagination. It was also the culmination of decades of development in computer animation.
This year two of the men behind those advancements, Ed Catmull and Pat Hanrahan, are the recipients of the Turing Award. The award recognizes “lasting and major” contributions to the field of computing and is considered to be the “Nobel Prize” of computer science.
The award is given by the Association for Computing Machinery and comes with a $1.67m cash prize split between the winners.
