 Welcome
to the Digital City Project
Toru
Ishida
Department of Social Informatics, Kyoto University
NTT Open Laboratory
The Digital
City Project is a three-year initiative sponsored by NTT. Established
in October of 1998, the project consists primarily of researchers from
NTT and Kyoto University, but also includes a wide variety of people from
other organizations. Contributors include several different universities
in Kyoto and leading computer companies. Researchers and designers from
overseas have also joined the project.
As the
population of Internet users increases, various community networking ideas
are being tried out. The Internet is not just for universities and businesses
but will become a fixture in everyday life. The concept of digital cities
thus proposed is to build an arena where people in communities can share
knowledge, experience and mutual interests. Our digital city is not an
imaginary city using virtual reality technology, instead our digital city
complements the corresponding physical city, and provides social information
infrastructure for this urban community.
The digital
city project makes available different city metaphors: a 2D map and a
3D interface, which are easy to understand for non-technical people. Web
site information is collected and linked to the 2D/3D city. Real-time
sensory data from the physical city is also mapped to the digital city.
People can get information relating to various activities in the physical
city: traffic, weather, parking, shopping, sight-seeing and so on. The
digital city also encourages social interaction among residents and tourists.
The digital
city is a living city, which can incorporate everyday activities. Though
the Internet is global and makes businesses global, an individual's life
is inherently local. Our project will develop a digital city Kyoto in
three years as a future information infrastructure. The first year research
(October 1998 - September 1999) is planned as follows.
(1) Human Interface
in Digital Cities
To integrate WWW information and real-time sensory data,
3D graphic technology becomes a key component of the interface. Though
there are various approaches for building 3D cities, we started with 3DML
for our initial prototype. Since 3DML is easy to use, college students
in Kyoto can join us to cooperatively build the 3D Kyoto. This can be
described as a "bazaar approach" to software develoment. We
will create an initial interface to all of Kyoto city by combining the
2D map with about ten 3D 3DML spots.
(2) Information
Sharing in Digital Cities
The
digital city integrates WWW and sensory data. We extract addresses from
WWW pages and convert them to XY coordinates using a geographical database.
The automatic conversion becomes the key technology for digital cities
to provide dynamic information from the Internet. For real-time information,
we are considering current bus schedules, traffic status, weather conditions,
and live video from the fire department. We expect various companies will
provide the availability of parking lots, restaurant tables and so on.
WWW retrieval under the constraint of sensory data is an interesting research
issue.
(3) Social Interaction
in Digital Cities
Social interaction is an important factor of digital cities.
We are now trying to implement a digital bus tour for international tourists.
Our tour guide is a Microsoft Agent carefully designed based on observation
of human volunteer tour guides. Using collected dialogues, the guide agent
supports conversations with tourists from different cultures.
We also
have encountered numerous non-technical research issues: security, privacy,
intellectual property and so on. To gain a better understanding of the
big picture of digital cities, we are planning to have an international
meeting on digital cities in Kyoto, in Autumn, 1999. Through implementing
a digital city Kyoto, and collaborating with worldwide activities on digital
cities, we hope to develop a social information infrastructure for the
21st century.
(January 1999)
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