text: It's been a while since I've been here.
  I don't have any good excuses as to why I haven't tried to finish the USB adapter.
  Kicking off our Native Dancer project at work. I was at work late tonight getting a basic informational page for the project up.
  I've been dealing with red tape at work trying to purchase software we will need for the project. We just completed the order for Marvelous Designer, which we'll be using for designing powwow regalia.
  The next software package on the list will be the Reallusion software stack for character/avatar development. Basically, I'm trying stretch the project budget so get everything iClone, Character Creator, Motion Live for our Xsens mocap system, PopcornFX, the Unreal connector, and all the add-ons. Waiting on academic pricing to find out if I can afford it.
  We're working with NVIDIA to develop the character creation and animation pipeline implemented through Omniverse.
  The first step is to hire an artist. There aren't a lot of 3D artists/character animators in North Dakota, and even harder to find a student with those skills and tribal community membership. But we finally got an applicant for the position. So I'm hoping that we'll have at least one Competitive Powwow character, maybe more... modeled, animated, and working in Unreal 5 with cloth physics implemented in Unreal Chaos Physics by the end of this summer.
  Mars XR Challenge
  The other big thing we're going in the VR Lab this summer is putting together a competition submission for the NASA Mars XR Challenge. I wasn't planning on doing this competition, but it's an opportunity for my student programmer to get his feet wet in Unreal. And I'll need him to have experience for the Native Dancer project by the end of the summer. He's really excited about doing the project, which is good. I'm basically paying him to work on it 20hrs per week for the rest of this month, all of June, and most of July.