GoKawiilWhile walking to school as a child, Jernej Barbič would marvel at how beautiful his home was. He was born and raised in a picturesque village in northwestern Slovenia (formerly Yugoslavia), located in the European Alps. Surrounded by alpine and beech trees, Barbic dreamed of replicating their swaying in the wind for others to enjoy.
At the time, he didn’t have the tools or the knowledge to create a system that could do that, but it sparked his interest in computer graphics, he says.
Jernej Barbič Employer University of Southern California, in Los Angeles Title Professor of computer science Member grade Senior member Alma maters University of Ljubljana, in Slovenia; Carnegie Mellon
Twenty years later, in 2016, Barbič, a professor of computer science at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, made his mark. His Ziva VFX software system allows for the creation of realistic muscle, fat, and skin simulations for 3D digital humans and creatures.
The technology was launched in 2016 by a startup he helped found, Ziva Dynamics, headquartered in Vancouver. It was acquired in 2021 by Unity Technologies of San Francisco.
Ziva VFX has been used in more than 60 movies including Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom; Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire; and Venom: Let There Be Carnage.
For the design and development of Ziva VFX, Barbič, an IEEE senior member, received a 2025 technical achievement Academy Award. It was a “tremendous honor,” he says, as the award recognizes technologies that have had a significant impact on motion picture production.
“Computer graphics and simulation can sometimes feel like a specialized technical field,” he says, “but the award showed that these ideas affect not just science but also art and how stories are told on screen.
“The digital characters enabled by mathematics become important parts of people’s lives.”
Sparking an interest in computer graphics
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