Thank you for inviting me. I'm sorry I couldn't be there in person. I'm in Ottawa next week, but not this week.
I am the director of business development for the Centre for Digital Media, which is an institution owned by the four universities in Vancouver. It was originally set up with seed money from the provincial government. We are now three years old and have 50 graduates. Eight companies have spun off from us, and I think we're a Canadian success story. I also think we are the new world of digital media.
I don't have a formal opening statement. I just want to talk about how exciting the future is and the potential for Canada to be a real leader in this area, based on the examples of our students.
Our students come from all over the world and all over Canada. Some come from computer science, but we also have somebody who is a paleontologist. They come from a broad sector. They all work together on teams and produce projects for outside clients and outward-facing, for lack of a better word, people who pay us money to produce things for them.
Just before I came here, I met with six of our project teams to talk about issues and delivering, and I want to give you some background on what those projects are so that you can see how exciting this is and see the great breadth of what we can produce.
The first project is called Nom Nom Rider and Banana Samurai. It's produced for the British Columbia Innovation Council and Microsoft. It's basically a game for elementary school students. It's going to be launched on Monday on the new Windows Phone 7, and it's to teach them how to eat properly: if you eat bad food and you don't exercise, you eventually explode. It's based on the old idea of Mario Brothers. It's really cool, and the students we've tested it on love it. I just showed it to Telus, and Telus is really interested in bringing it into the market in both B.C. and Alberta. That's one little project.
Another project we're working on is something for the men's health initiative of B.C. The mandate of that project is to extend the healthy living lifespan of men by 10 years. They're doing a massive social media project using video and games to teach 20-something men that attitude is actually the reason they don't live as long as women. It has a lot of edge, and we're getting some really cool feedback from both DDB and Cossette Advertising.
These are just some of the projects we're working on.
A third project uses a science fiction novel to develop an alternative reality game for a small, independent production company in Toronto. They are producing a game as well as doing some artwork for the television series that's coming out of this science fiction novel.
Another one we're doing is called “Making It Work”. Basically it's an e-learning manual to show people living with rheumatoid arthritis how they can actually work. It has a combination of animation and full-motion videos--real, live video.
We're doing a project called Gold Mountain for the UBC history department and the Barber centre at UBC. Its purpose is to teach Canadians, primarily high school students, about Chinese history in Canada. Instead of doing the traditional web portal, we're actually building a traditional Chinese town in virtual reality in the Cariboo, and it's going to be based on game principles.
Finally, the other project I just touched on was a project we're doing with BigPark, a game company that was just acquired by Microsoft. We're doing some R and D development on HTML5, which is the platform that will be running on the iPad and the iPhone.
That's just to give you some excitement about where we can take digital media. I could talk all day about our projects--we've got over 50--but I just wanted to give you a flavour of what this country can produce in a very short period of time. It's a really exciting future.