2024 ILDA Special Achievement Award
An ILDA Special Achievement Award has been handed out to Dirk Apitz and Matthias Frank at the 2024 ILDA Conference in Wroclaw/Poland on Friday September 27, 2024.
The ILDA Special Achievement Award is given for significant achievements that are not already sufficiently covered by existing ILDA Award categories. Before 2024, it has only been given twice, once in 2021 and the very first in 2013. More information will be completed soon on https://www.ilda.com/awardsSAAlist.htm
The information given about the 2024 award will be:
Special Achievement Award for Developing the ILDA Digital Network Standard
Presented to Dirk Apitz and Dr. Matthias Frank for their essential contributions over the past dozen years in creating, developing and promoting the ILDA Digital Network (IDN).
Dirk has a very strong background in networking protocols and development of software and hardware. He chairs the technical committee since October 14, 2010 with the long term goal to establish a digital version of the analogue ISP connector. He presented the beginnings of IDN at the 2012 ILDA Conference in San Antonio with a fully working demo. He has since poured countless hours and personal funds into developing software, hardware, standards and compliance tests for IDN and support for developers and users.
Dr. Matthias Frank in his position as senior lecturer and researcher at the University of Bonn has supervised numerous student projects that have contributed to IDN, in addition to his own work on the standard.
The IDN-Stream specification was adopted by ILDA at the conference in Dubai 2015 and was used for full conference streaming since the conference in Montreal 2018. For the cloud conferences in 2020 and 2021, IDN has been used to stream laser shows across the internet. At the conference in London in 2022, a multi-projector Laser show including audio, encoded into an IDN file, was streamed across WIFI using IDN.
Dirk and Matthias have led an enormous, multi-year effort. They have persevered in making a workable, open-source standard that has been adopted by a leading laser show software company, LaserAnimation Sollinger, and is routinely used at ILDA Conferences to record and play back the Laser Jockey competition laser shows.
