A hi-tech Oxford company has beaten competition from Hollywood to receive an Emmy award in Los Angeles.

Thanks to an invention by Oxford scientists, the company, 2d3, won a Primetime Emmy Engineering Award for its Boujou automated camera tracker.

Oxford Metrics Group, based in Botley, Oxford, set up 2d3 to develop the Boujou, which has revolutionised special effects in films such as Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Spiderman.

OMG chief executive Julian Morris said: "We have only been selling the product for 18 months, but it seems to work very well. It was used in the first Harry Potter film and they have used it a lot more in the new one.

"It's used when you want to put something artificial into live footage. You have to do something called matchmoving or camera tracking, to make the computer-generated sequences match the live sequences."

This was previously a highly skilled and expensive process, but Mr Morris saw that the movie industry could benefit from advanced mathematics being used at Oxford University by physicist Professor Andrew Zisserman to analyse human vision.

After licensing the technology from the university in 1998, OMG spend three years developing it into a marketable software product.

Dinotopia, Band of Brothers, Jim Henson's Jack & The Beanstalk: The Real Story and Buffy the Vampire Slayer are among other productions to use Boujou's matchmoving technology.

The Emmy citation said the system had a "revolutionary impact on the creation of complex visual effects".

It said: "Boujou has made a major contribution to high-profile television productions, music videos and commercials by making it easier to create special effects combining live action and 3D."