Lovie Awards honour Eve Online scientists and the inventor of the webcam

Thomas McMullan Read more November 10, 2017

The Lovie Awards might sound like a celebration of the very best in theatrical hams, but they’ve actually been banging the gong for technology pioneers for years. Next week is the seventh Lovie Awards – and the best and brightest in the European web scene are being honoured in London.

Lovie Awards honour Eve Online scientists and the inventor of the webcam

The Lovie Awards announce the full list of winners ahead of the event. This time around this includes budding filmmakers, scientists who gather data with the help of video games, and the inventor of a fundamental part of modern communication.

Dr Quentin Stafford-Fraser will be picking up the Lifetime Achievement Award for his role in the invention of the first webcam. Stafford-Fraser created the XCoffee client program in 1991, which showed a live video feed of a coffee pot at three frames per second. Gripping. From there, it’s only a hop, skip and jump to filmmakers like Sam Saffold, winner of the Lovie Creator for Change award for his work on YouTube, with films that explore community diversity. trojan_black_3

(Above: The XCoffee client showing the ‘Trojan Room’ coffee pot)

Livia Firth will be given the Lovie Emerging Entrepreneur prize for her work with sustainable consultancy firm Eco-Age, which, in the words of the Lovie’s website, “uses the internet to both educate the public about ethical and sustainable fashion consumption”. In the Greater with Data category, Bernard Revaz and Attila Szantner will be honoured for their role in using the video game EVE Online to gather scientific data with Project Discovery:

“By gamifying the process of searching for new planets and opening it up to the entire internet, Project Discovery applies the concept of crowdsourced knowledge on a completely unmatched scale,” the Lovies says. “In doing so, Project Discovery breaks down the barrier between scientific research and the public at large, fostering interest in science, and harnessing the collective brainpower around the globe to achieve impressive ends.”

We’ll be talking to Revaz and Szantner about their work close to next week’s ceremony, so watch this space for that. Last year, I went along and spoke to Hannes Munzinger – a data journalist for German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung – who walked me through the inside story behind the Panama Papers leak.

The Lovie Awards will happen on 16 November. You can find a full list of winners here.