July 16, 2008 DIVA meeting

 Martin Eric Foxall, Hélène Day Fraser, Ko Hachimura, Allison Lenters, Martin Oberg, Bob Pritchard, Seiya Tsuruta, Adriano Vilela, Ying Yin,

Status of backup systems: server backups still have not been implemented. Gregor has not responded to requests on this. Perhaps Sid can discuss this with him.

N.B.: Dentistry had many Mac computers stolen from labs and offices a few weeks ago.

Reports from:

	Allison: presets are now available for users to quickly initialize a performance environment. 
	Ying: pitch scaling is implemented, allowing us to set pitch curves for different situations
	Eric: is creating a dictionary and training system for vizemes – users can manipulate facial features to create images to match phonemes
	Helene Day Fraser: new glove is nearly complete. Will give to Eric to do the snap fasteners for Marguerite, and it should be ready for Monday. She is also looking at implementing a new harness setup involving a sleeve that would still allow for ventilation.

Monday we begin three days of intensive training for Marguerite to work on a video example for the wearables website.

New equipment for the video suite is coming.

Sid has suggested we activate the wired glove for practice/development sessions as well. Bob will discuss this with Ying and Allison.

Given the enormous amount of work that has been done this summer and the large number of changes we are going to need a user manual detailing how to install, initialize, load and run the software. Bob and Sid will need to discuss some approaches to this.

Reminder to keep your dates updated on the website.

Papers: currently working on a paper for Toronto symposium. Helene asked about the Pittsburgh paper and Bob indicated that he was expecting her to give that.

Ying pointed out that the current thumb contact makes it difficult to begin a sentence with a stopped consonant. After some discussion it was agreed that if the thumb contact area was extended down the sleeve is would allow the thumb to be free to articulate at the beginning of a sentence. Hélène will make the change in the current glove.

Ying also mentioned problems with the software freezing. That might be caused by DAC overload, and it might be solvable by compiling the entire system as a standalone. [Bob has discussed this with Sid and the freezing may be due to a memory leak. We will continue to investigate this.]

Ko asked about presentations and performances involving the glove. He suggested that it would be good to have a performance January 23, 2009 at his conference at Ritsumeikan.