As we met today we mostly experimented with the DAZ Studios that we downloaded on Tuesday. We downloaded the base characters V3 and M3 and familiarized ourselves with the program contents. Part of this familiarization included individual experimentation and collaboration as well as working through the tutorial.

We recently received an email invitation to participate in the International Conference on Entertainment Computing concerning Advanced interaction design i.e. haptics; education and training technologies; augmented,virtual and mixed realities. This conference will be held in Sanda, Japan at Kwansei Gakuin University on September 19-21. Today we began a proposal for funding to go to this conference using LaTex format.

One question we had today was about Microsoft visual studios and its significance in Artoolkit. Their is a downloadable version of Artoolkit for a MAC but Microsoft visual studios is not compatible on a MAC. We also have downloaded DAZ Studios which is similar to Microsoft visual studios but is compatible with a MAC. Why is Micorsoft visual studios needed if not compatible on all computers and do we need two image rendering programs?

The last two weeks have been spent at ADHA( in Las Vegas, NV) and other science related workshops and meetings(in Hawaii). As we met back with each other after two weeks we realized that we needed to update our Artoolkit with the updated version on the washington Hitlab website.
We also were able to render images using the vrml artoolkit that we were unable to do so before. During the two weeks we did not meet we each individually researched 3D cranial models, which will be coded into the artoolkit so that when an image is rendered we will see the cranium. Today we reviewed those possibilities and purchased a package of virtual muscle and skeleton images of the cranium and the entire body we also had to download Daz Studios, spot rendering and the base from Dazproductions.com or Daz3d.com so that we were able to view the images. After we downloaded all we thought necessary, some of our computers signaled a "crash" impending on the computer. We discovered that we need a high powered graphics card. One that is compatible with openGL with 128 MB of ram. The one that daz recommended was Nvidia geforce series.
We also contacted Teleos research about haptics for our virtual image. We were unable to contact a person but left a detailed message on the answering machine. The Teleos website is very difficult to find and once found, access is not granted unless you have a correct user name and password. So we contacted a phone number found on a website we found doing a google search of "Teleos" and will hopefully be responded to.

Today we started familiarizing our group with computer software programing and microsoft visual studios. We purchased our Head mounted display (i-glasses) and we started to use the image cards we printed from the washington hitlab website to render images with our webcam. We reviewed the archive of the artoolkit mailing list to see if any other groups or persons had asked the same questions we had. Our questions were

• How do we render VRML (virtual reality modeling language) images?
  
• What is the best HMD to use?

We looked at i-glasses which has a resolution of 640x480 which is pretty poor but usable

We also looked at the olympus(eyetrek)FMD 700 but it did not have see through mode

We looked at cy-visor at wwwpersonaldisplay.com but those did not have see through mode either

We researched glasstron by sony but those were out of our price range

• What does msvcirtd.dll mean and if it is a file how do we find it?
  

At first we thought it was part of a fire wall but we ran an antispyware program and it still gave us the msvcirtd.dll missing file error

msvcirtd.dll is a file library

msvcirtd.dll and msvcrtd.dll are both available in artoolkit 2.65 (not vrml) and we copied and pasted those files from 2.65 to artoolkit direct show 2.52 vrml and the missing file alert did not come up and we were able to render and image on our home computers

We are not computer programers but we need to know some things about coding in order to get the image that we need. We are and will be continuing to get familiar with coding by doing the examples on the artoolkit manual.

We started working on our Augmented reality project for Weber State Dental Hygiene students. Our purpose is to use augmented reality to teach and learn local anesthetic. We started off by reviewing our calender for the summer and then researching and downloading those programs and documents needed for our project.

• We downloaded Artoolkit on our home computers
• We practiced rendering images using artoolkit and a webcam
• We researched the best head mounted display available in our price range
• We purchased personal webcams for home instant message conferences
  
• We subscibed to the artoolkit mailing list to explore others questions on augmented reality
• We read and followed the tutorial on artoolkit