Julia   C.   Zhang

The Moon Experience - based on the lunar landings of the Apollo program in 1961-1972, the Moon Experience is an interactive and immersive virtual reality system, designed and developed through the technology of virtual reality in conjunction with game design, learning theories, storytelling approach, motion capture, and computer animation.  See and Read more ......

Waving Ribbons - is a part of Forsythe project led by Maria Palazzi and Norah Zuniga Shaw in collaboration with choreographer William Forsythe. It is intended to reproduce an ensemble dance of 17 dancers from William Forsythe Inc. The goal is to illustrate the classical choreographic principles. With 3D time-vary data, I used ribbons to trace the dancers' movement so that the ribbon extrusions match the dancers' moving paths in time. I then made ribbons wave by adding turbulence or wind fields. For more information, please visit the multi-award-winning Synchronous Objects website.

The Nearby Star System - is an interactive application created in a game engine, Unity, to illustrate stars within 50 light years including the solar system. A user can use a keyboard and mouse to explore this virtual universe. The color of a star indicates its stellar classification. In the solar system, a user can go forward and backward in time and see the movements of planets and their satellites. The accurate positions of celestial objects are computed through Swiss Ephemeris (API and DLL). The theme music created by Marty Quinn “illustrates the hourly changing values of 7 variables representing concentrations and ratios of iron and oxygen atoms, electron energy levels, and counterstreaming electron events”. Please visit UNH Experimental Space Plasma Group to see their interesting works.

Animation with Music - given a piece of music by John Cage, I was asked to create an animation. I thought the final work should be something abstract like the works of Oskar Fischinger, Len Lye, and Norman McLaren. The music brought to mind a tranquil scene of a pond full of joy and energy. Flowers were animated with blend shapes; tadpoles were animated with bend deformers; and background was animated through keyframing texture.

Lightning over South Dakota - The South Dakota Lightning Mapping Array (LMA) consists of 10 sensor stations that monitor very high frequency radio waves emitted by lightning. This dataset provides detailed information about a lightning event that occurred in western South Dakota around 2:50 PM on July 19th, 2014. The lightning flash contour data were generated by the scientists based on the raw LMA data. The lightning showed in this work lasts about 1.5 seconds. The animation repeats the lightning event 14 times played at the actual speed of the event to illustrate detailed 3D lightning observations and the lightning's dynamic progression providing a unique perspective on extreme weather.

  

  

Wind Flow over Salinity in the Selected Area

Megadroughts in U.S. West Projected to be Worst of the Millennium - Droughts in the Southwest and Central Plains of the United States in the second half of the 21st century could be drier and longer than anything humans have seen in those regions in the last 1,000 years, according to a new NASA study published in Science Advances on Feb 12, 2015. The research found continued increases in human-produced greenhouse gas emissions drives up the risk of severe droughts in these regions. More info -- https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/details.cgi?aid=4270