reas throughout the central U.K. are practically tripping over each other to claim the title of Britain's Digital or Creative Media Capital, or some variation thereof. From Coventry to Birmingham to Sheffield to Nottingham – and in lots of other locations – universities are teaming with regional economic development groups and private enterprises to build the infrastructure necessary for creative, digital, gaming and related industry sectors to flourish. The result is the emergence of a digital media cluster encompassing much of the U.K. interior where the steel, cutlery and automotive industries were the economic engines since the Industrial Revolution.
      The area's digital revolution is too nascent for one to say with any certainty that it will make the same contribution to national economic performance as heavy industry did in its day. But large pots of money and a growing chorus of experts say digital media will be a leading economic driver as manufacturing migrates from the West to the East.
      "I'm told we're the fastest-growing region in the U.K. in terms of job growth in the digital industries, so there's a lot going on here," says Gene DePrez, chief innovation officer at Creative Sheffield, the City of Sheffield's development company. DePrez headed IBM's global location strategies consulting practice for the Americas in New Jersey before taking on the Sheffield assignment in the summer of 2008. "The sector is definitely a job generator on two levels: on the local level with organic growth from small companies becoming large, and, second, as the potential grows to attract large companies into the area."
      The two local universities – Sheffield Hallum and the University of Sheffield – are graduating more students with degrees in creative media than can be absorbed by existing industry, but most students want to stay in the area, DePrez observes. One hurdle to digital media companies coming into the area was a lack of appropriate work space for them, he adds. But that has been resolved.
      The Digital Square Mile in the center of Sheffield is home to a variety of facilities and resources for digital industries, including incubators, managed work space, research institutions and business support services. The Sheffield Digital Campus is a key piece of this infrastructure now under development, with the first phase due to open at year's end. At full build-out over the next eight to 10 years, the project will encompass 500,000 sq. ft. (46,450 sq. m.) of space designed specifically for the digital and creative media industries.
      "There will be a lot of great occupancy alternatives available for companies that want to match up the available talent with the facilities, and with the cluster of creative and entrepreneurial activity going on at the universities and in the area," says DePrez.       Such centers are increasingly ubiquitous as the region's infrastructure evolves, particularly university research facilities. Just two years ago, the University of Wolverhampton opened its £9-million (US$17.5-million) New Technology Centre, built for academic and commercial use. The building was co-funded by Advantage West Midlands, the European Regional Development Fund and the Higher Education Funding Council for England. The facility is intended to bolster education resources in the area's IT sector so as to give students sharper skills to apply, ideally in the West Midlands' digital industry.
      The New Technology Centre features high-tech computing; engineering, design and media equipment; specialist labs, including design and construction labs; prototyping equipment; two TV studios; a radio studio; and digital editing suites. Its Virtual Design Enterprise Centre is one of the first purpose-built virtual reality centers in the Midlands, and lets users visualize and evaluate plans in detail.
      Elsewhere in the region, Nottingham's former fashion center building is being transformed into a Digital Media Technology Center to bolster that city's stake in the creative industries and as a leading Science City in the U.K. When work got under way on the £794,000 (US$1.5-million) project in 2007, Nottingham supported 8,100 jobs in 1,400 businesses in the sector, and those numbers are growing.
      "We have got thousands of creative and design graduates in this area, particularly those coming out of Nottingham Trent University," noted Rob Wadsworth of the Nottingham City Council in a Nottingham Evening Post article on July 18th, 2007. "Our research shows that this is one of the sectors that is growing," he wrote, "and the caliber of the graduates we are producing represents untapped potential."       Meanwhile, in Coventry, Prime Minister Gordon Brown opened the University of Warwick's new Digital Laboratory on July 25th, using "virtual scissors" to cut a ribbon in cyberspace. The £13-million (US$25.3-million) lab is the brainchild of Professor Lord Kumar Bhattacharyya, director of Warwick Manufacturing Group.
      "This Digital Lab is the future," he noted. "We are bringing together some of the world's top academics in digital technologies working on digital manufacturing and digital healthcare. We are working with partners on product development and creating virtual reality environments for prototyping and testing human responses," he continues. "E-security, cradle-to-grave product management and process improvement will also be key themes."
      The prime minister's virtual ribbon cutting was more than mere high-tech theatre. The computer-generated scissors he used simulated the feeling of cutting through real ribbon, which is the result of the blending of two important technologies under research at the university – informatics and visualization.
      Informatics Professor Vinesh Raja explains: "One of the projects we are working on is to create lifelike, simulated training for surgeons so that they can experience what it feels like to cut through live human tissue without having to use live patients. It will both look and feel like operating on a real person, but they can do it time and time again and even measure their performance against the recorded techniques of top surgeons."       To that point, Professor Bob Stone plays a key role in the area's cultivation of digital and creative technologies, working with potential investors to gauge new products' viability and to cut through some of the hype associated with the sector.
      "What I'm seeing in the U.K. – and it's bound to happen on the Continent – is national and regional government bodies seeing a development coming from the U.S., and they think, 'We must catch up or we'll be left behind.' It was this way in the virtual reality days. They figure they must invest in an institute or a center without really thinking through what the end-user community actually needs."
      Stone runs the Human Interface Technologies (HIT) Team at the University of Birmingham, which works with potential end users to develop what he calls de-risking demonstrators to see whether an application is commercially or otherwise sound. "We do a combination of research and industrial hand holding," Stone explains.
      Much of the HIT Team's work is in the area of "serious games," an emerging cottage industry that seeks to take principles and systems inherent in the gaming sector and apply them to new, primarily education-based contexts.
      "Serious games go beyond entertainment to deliver learning in its broadest sense," says Stone. "There's first-person, gratuitous shoot-'em-up action, but we're talking about taking the software that allows that action and building it into a formative training and educational experience – a serious application."
      "Serious games is about games-based learning, but it's about other things as well, such as advertising a brand or simulation," adds Dan Licari, Digital Central Project Manager at Coventry University and coordinator of www.seriousaboutgames.com, a property of the Interactive Digital Media project managed by Birmingham City University and funded by Advantage West Midlands. The Universities of Birmingham, Warwick and Coventry are also working on serious games initiatives.
      "About £20 million [US$39 million], initially, will be disseminated over the next two years among companies to develop new projects, and ways to demonstrate how this technology can be used," says Licari. National and regional development groups are the primary funding sources. "The nice thing about our position is that people are coming for what is already here. We're in a strategically good spot as the second city in the U.K., and the incentives from the regional development agency are such that they are going out on a limb to court companies."
      The global market for serious games applications is north of £100 billion (US$194 billion), Licari estimates, and the U.K.'s share is about 10 percent of that. So the Midlands' role in cultivating digital and creative industry sectors is more than significant.
      "The West Midlands is the center of the serious games sector at the moment," says Stone. "But other regions will come along very quickly."
      When that happens, the U.K. will be well equipped to compete, says Stone, in large part because of the very work he and others are involved in.
      "The U.K. is unique in its ability to provide the human-factor side of things," he explains. "It's a soft science, but one that's often ignored. We're very strong in the U.K. at human-centered technologies. That's a key driver relative to other locations where gaming might be going on."