Canadians will enrich their lives by harnessing new opportunities, increasing productivity, decreasing cost and waste, and connecting, collaborating, buying, and selling globally. The GRAND vision is to create capacity for Canada to further develop and enhance its position as a global leader in new media, animation, and games. The national scale and scope provide a diversity of academic and industry expertise and a greater capacity to integrate that expertise with the needs of partners in the private and public sectors.

The advantage of the GRAND Network is its ability to mobilize existing centres of excellence, thereby reducing risk and accelerating innovation through access to enabling technologies and methodologies, increasing capacity to train highly qualified personnel through direct participation in research and commercialization activities, providing greater and more immediate access to state-of-the-art research results and expertise, and overcoming barriers of scalability for content generation, selection, and delivery.

The concept of new media historically referred to any digital, interactive application. Today, practically everything is digital. We envision applications that comprise significant multimedia elements founded on innovative gaming, simulation, animation, and graphics principles that may be integrated with rich text and enabled for delivery using a range of platforms from mobile devices to large screen displays.

Expected outcomes from our research will ultimately contribute new games for single- and multi-player environments, novel social media such as a next-generation privacy-aware Facebook, e-learning and edutainment environments for personalized learning in schools and corporate environments that enhance knowledge acquisition and skill development, information appliances that support a range of information-intensive applications for delivery of news and social commentary, digital books, and virtual museums and galleries. Specific objectives include enhancing Canada's ability to innovate in the growing cultural industries sector, providing exemplary showcases of how new media can foster better understanding of sustainability issues, using new media technology to improve training for healthcare and other professionals, and stimulating and informing public discourse over the next decade on important policy issues surrounding new media. Our core work will enhance user experience with innovative functionality that addresses the social, legal, economic, and cultural perspectives of new media.

Our vision-within-the-vision -- itself a contribution that will have a significant impact on Canada's ability to compete globally -- emphasizes the role of Design within every step of the innovation chain, starting with basic research that takes a usercentered approach to developing new technology within socio-economic contexts and progressing to early-prototype and late-stage commercialization linkages with industry partners. This will impact partners and the user sector over the next five to ten years by providing a generation of highly-qualified personnel who have experienced first-hand the benefits of this approach and who are ready and able to put their skills into practice to create new wealth and a better quality of life for Canadians.

The strength GRAND brings is a rich, interconnected collaboration that crosses disciplinary boundaries, geographic boundaries, and private-public sector boundaries. The GRAND team and its many partners combine domain expertise, scientific method, humanistic inquiry, engineering knowledge, and design flair to conduct unique research and build exemplary prototypes useful to Canada.