Indian engineer Vikas Sathaye bags award in sci-tech Oscar 2018

Friday February 16, 2018 , 2 min Read

Vikas Sathaye, a 50-year-old engineer from Pune, was honored with an Oscar for 2018. However, he did not receive it for artistic reasons but for his work in the field of science and technology. He was part of the four-member team that bagged the Oscar 2018 award in the Scientific and Technical awards category.

Shotover K1 Camera system, the camera that the team designed have been used in a lot of Hollywood films including Guardians of the Galaxy, Dunkirk and Kong - Skull Island.

Born in 1967, Vikas grew up in Mulund of Mumbai until he completed schooling. After that, he moved to Pune where he did BE in Electronics from VIT and then went on to complete masters in instrumentation from IISC, Bengaluru.

Vikas worked as a professor in Pune's Cummins College of Engineering for Women for seven years before moving to New Zealand where he started working with Shotover Camera Systems in Queenstown. The camera - Shotover K1 Camera system was designed there by a team of four members of which Vikas was part of. Talking about the camera in an interview with Times of India, he said

The camera mount gets attached to the base of a helicopter, which carries the camera and lens. Its primary function is to eliminate any vibration from reaching the camera and thus getting steady footage. The other function for the camera mount is to move the camera head in the desired direction as required by the camera operator, who sits inside the helicopter and uses a joystick to control the camera head movement.

Three others who shared the award with Vikas Sathaye are John Coyle, Brad Hurndell and Shane Buckham. Expressing his happiness on the team receiving the award, Brad Hurdnell, Chief Executive of the company told Otago Daily Times,