Gary Oberbrunner
Biography
Gary Oberbrunner is a software engineer and technology executive with over 40 years of experience in high-performance computing, GPU programming, and visual effects. He began his career at Masscomp creating A/D converters, then moved to Thinking Machines Corporation, developing massively parallel graphics and visualization software on the CM. In 1997 he joined Karl Sims at GenArts as its second employee, co-developing Sapphire Plug-ins, the industry-leading visual effects suite for film and television. Gary and Karl won an Engineering Emmy Award in 2019 for their work on Sapphire. Gary served in various roles with GenArts for nearly 20 years, continuing as Chief Technology Officer of Boris FX after its acquisition. He then founded Dark Star Systems, where he created BioViz Studio for scientific data visualization.
Oberbrunner continues to create various open-source tools and projects. He is director of the Academy Software Foundation Open Effects standards committee which oversees the OFX standard for visual effects plug-ins, and he is president of the Long Now Boston organization, a nonprofit focused on long-term thinking.