Creative BC + BC Arts Council Interactive Fund Recipients

Today, Creative BC is pleased to announce the recipients of the latest round of funding through the Interactive Fund.  This fund is supported through a partnership with the BC Arts Council delivering $675,000 to 11 successful British Columbia-based companies through a peer adjudicated award process. These 11 companies will leverage the funds for development of their original, creative, interactive digital media and software applications. This year, the tenth round of the competitive Fund received 103 applications. 
 

The Interactive Fund serves Creative BC’s strategic objectives as the economic development agency for the province’s creative industries. Through strategic collaboration, culture and commerce are uniting again to sustain the creative economy, attract new investment, and stimulate the creation of new jobs and career opportunities in B.C.
 

The following individuals are this year’s successful recipients, and each will receive a grant of up to $100,000 for the development of their submitted projects:
 

1.     Inscape Studios, Proximity: Chapter One, Vancouver ($100,000)
Proximity is a story-driven adventure for VR, where you team up with a voice-interactive robot sidekick to protect a mysterious natural phenomenon on a distant planet. 
 

2.     Henry Tsang, 360 Riot Walk, Vancouver ($50,000)
360 Riot Walk is an interactive self-guided walking tour that employs the use of VR technology to address a significant moment in Vancouver’s history: The Anti-Asian Riots of 1907.
 

3.     Imposter Media, Discriminator, Victoria ($50,000)
An animated interactive documentary series that explores facial recognition, deepfakes and AI. By training an artificial intelligence using the viewer’s face, Discriminator will help you understand a technology that changes the way we think about truth, identity and power.
 

4.     Lifelike & Believable Animation Design, Inc. Press Play!, New Westminster ($100,000)
Press Play! combines the death-defying thrills of live circus with stunning, real-time cinematic digital imagery in an immersive multiuser 3D virtual world that remotely connected audiences can enter and explore with friends from their PCs, laptops, and virtual reality headsets.
 

5.     Ludare Games Group Inc., Project Viper, Vancouver ($75,000)

A 3D endless top-down arcade shooter game, Project Viper will be the first officially licensed mobile game of an iconic movie franchise. Maneuver your fighter plane and shoot through waves and waves of enemies and bosses. Collect Boosts, activate Advanced Weaponry abilities, and more!
 

6.     Mindful Garden Digital Health Inc., Change of State, Vancouver ($50,000)
MindfulGarden is developing the first video game played by the body’s voice, gestures, and vital signs. The project brings together wearable sensors and biofeedback data in the treatment of anxiety, clinical research on anxiety and behaviour modification, game design, and most important, the role of interactive digital technologies and design in the emerging areas of digital health and mental wellness.
 

7.     Mobil Art School Inc., EQ, Vancouver ($50,000)
EQ is an interactive app inspired by the surrealist drawing game "exquisite corpse". Users anywhere can connect for fun, creative expression and collaboration through drawing, painting, images, and writing, allowing users around the world to create together and produce surprising and unexpected results.
 

8.     re:Naissance Opera, Orpheus VR, Vancouver ($50,000)
Orpheus VR is a new virtual reality opera that immerses single audience members in a choose-your-own-adventure musical experience.
 

9.     Silverstring Media Inc., Glitchhikers 2 , Vancouver ($50,000)
Glitchhikers 2 is a game about liminal spaces, the parts of journeys that dominate our time but not our attention, when our minds wander to parts of ourselves and our world normally left unexamined. What do you see when you look at the night sky?
 

10.  Spliqs Intelligent Media Inc., Spliqs Music Creation App, Vancouver ($50,000)
Spliqs is an app for music creation and collaboration powered by AI. The app will enable users to interact with AI in real-time and 'steer' the generated music, like an instrument, toward what they like, without the need for deep musical knowledge.
 

11.  Strawberry Fields Interactive Inc., Aeksia, Vancouver ($50,000)
Aeksia is a platform that brings together a virtual tabletop and social networking in virtual reality (VR), for live tabletop RPG campaigns.  

Read more about the BC Arts Council and Creative BC Interactive Fund here.