The award program has been organized to reward the best open source contributions of 2025. All contributions were eligible for application: it could be an open-source plugin, a pull-request on GitHub, a video, a tutorial or documentation pages.

 
The SOFA Award 2020 strongly motivated me to dig into the code of SOFA and contribute way more to the open-source!
Camille Krewcun, PhD (UCA)

The program included two prizes. In previous edition, two prizes where distributed, one chosen by the public, and one by us, through a jury. This year, because of the late applications and the fact that the candidates where belonging to the core-dev team, the two winners have been chosen bu the public. The winners have been announced on 25th November during the 2025 SOFA Symposium:

Organizers’ Prize
Prize: 600€		 Public Prize
Prize: 400€
Themis Skamagkis
(InfinyTech3D, France)
Needle Insertion Simulation		 Alexandre Bilger
(Inria, France)
Generic FEM for elasticity
Extension to a SOFA needle-insertion plugins, including a unified puncture–insertion algorithm, a custom constraint solver, and regression-tested CI. Modular SOFA plugin that generically re-implements elastic force fields and supports linear and hyperelastic formulations.

Find all award candidates on the 2025 Award page here.

Among them, a third contribution was neck and neck for second place. Damien Marchal (Engineer at CNRS) proposed his ongoing work on Gaussian Splatting in SOFA. His Sofa.PointCloud plugin allows for loading, manipulating, and smoothly rendering 3D point clouds via Gaussian Splatting:

Congratulations to Themis & Alexandre!