The federal government is investing $23.25 million over five years in a new Network of Centres of Excellence (NCE) that will help develop the technology solutions, talent pool and policy environment needed to sustain and grow a vibrant digital media sector.

Co-located at the University of British Columbia and the Centre for Digital Media on the Great Northern Way Campus (GNWC), the Graphics, Animation and New Media Canada (GRAND) Network represents a key plank in the government’s goal of encouraging jobs and commercialization in strategic sectors. In 2008, Canada’s Science and Technology Innovation Council (STIC) identified information communications technology, including digital media, animation and games, as one of the country’s research and development strengths.

It’s the second major federal investment in digital media over the past year. In January 2009, the Canadian Digital Media Network received $10.7 million as a Centre of Excellence for Commercialization and Research to bring together the tool makers with the tool users, along with the skilled workers and venture capitalists, to boost Canada’s reputation as a growing international powerhouse for digital media.

Both networks will also support the government’s highly anticipated national digital economy strategy, expected for release in 2010.

“Today’s digital media is about much more than new media, animation and games,” explains Dr. Gerri Sinclair, GRAND’s executive director and CEO of the GNWC’s Centre for Digital Media. “It’s IT, arts, design, web applications and e-learning. It’s social networking as well as complex modeling, simulations and image processing in medicine, science and the entertainment industry. It’s also about high-paying jobs and quality of life, and that requires new skills, new applications and a supportive policy environment.”

GRAND will support 32 projects clustered around five themes: New Media Challenges and Opportunities; Games and Interactive Simulation; Animation, Graphics and Imaging; and cross-cutting themes of Social, Legal, Economic and Cultural Perspectives and Enabling Technologies and Methodologies. The network involves 56 network investigators, researchers at 19 universities, as well as about 35 public and industry partners, including Autodesk, BioWare/Electronic Arts, Deluxe Postproduction, Rapid Mind, Rogers Communications and Side Effects.

“Many software tools are converging because everything is going digital,” says Dr. Kellogg Booth, scientific director of GRAND. “For example, we have projects looking at how animation software can be adapted for use by architects and the construction industry for computer-aided design. Other projects are looking at new techniques for computer animation, to make animated characters move and act in a more human like way.”

Project teams will include researchers from the social sciences and humanities who will study the social, legal, political, economic and cultural issues related to new media and the technologies that enable them.

GRAND will hold its inaugural national annual conference in June in Ottawa, where one of the hot topics will be the use of digital media and gaming technologies to help develop skills for visibility impaired, blind or mobility challenged people.

Researchers at the NeuroDevNet network, another NCE at UBC, are interested in partnering with GRAND Network researchers to look at how digital media and “biofeedback” game technology may be used to treat children with syndromes such as attention deficit disorder or autism.

“There’s a trend towards the ‘gameification’ of communications and education,” says Dr. Sinclair. “The idea is that you can get people to pay more attention to what you’re saying if it’s part of a game. We also want to study whether this is actually true or an urban myth.”

Another project is examining the use of high-end virtual reality systems and tactile feedback technology (haptics) to teach medical students and surgical residents a number of diagnostic and clinical procedures. These include prostate biopsies, laparoscopic gall bladder removal, and some specific cardiac and neuro-endoscopic interventions.

The use of virtual reality as a digital medium for training healthcare professionals can allow for more effective teaching at a lower cost. Digitally archived case studies can be selected to provide a richer curriculum for a wide range of healthcare professionals.

“Now we’re talking about using digital media to save lives,” says Dr. Booth. “The potential applications really are limitless.”