Activities and Technologies in Digital City Kyoto

We have developed a digital city for Kyoto, the old capital and cultural center of Japan, as a social information infrastructure for urban everyday life including shopping, business, transportation, education, social welfare and so on. The project was initiated by researchers in NTT and Kyoto University in 1998. In 1999, the Digital City Kyoto Experimentation Forum was launched. The forum includes several universities, local authorities, leading computer companies, local newspaper companies, historical temples, as well as photographers, programmers, students, volunteers and so on. Researchers and designers from overseas have also joined the project. One of the salient features of Digital City Kyoto is that computer scientists from universities and companies have continued to play a leading role in the organization. As a result, Digital City Kyoto is based on the newest technologies including GIS, VR, animation and social agents. The three-layer architecture for digital cities has been proposed: a) the information layer integrates both Web archives and realtime sensory information related to the city, b) the interface layer provides two and three dimensional views of the city, and c) the interaction layer assists social interaction among people who are living/visiting in/at the city. In this paper, the organization and activities of three year experiments, from 1998 to 2001, named Digital City Kyoto, and the technical/social lessons we have learned are described in detail. 1 Why Digital Cities? Many of the problems created in the 20th century, such as crowding, environmental pollution, food and energy crises remain to be solved in the 21st century. Effective solutions require the existence of a global consensus mechanism based on the Internet. In addition to negotiation at the national level, cross-border collaboration among countries and communities will form an essential part of the consensus mechanism. Intercultural interactions in daily life equal the importance of formal discussions held at inter-governmental conferences. The notion of digital cities can be defined as follows: digital cities will collect and organize the digital information of the corresponding cities, and provide a public information space for people living in and visiting them to interact with each other. Digital cities have been developed all over the world, and can be connected to each other via the Internet, just as physical cities are connected by surface and air transport systems. Activities and Technologies in Digital City Kyoto 167 Why do regional information spaces attract people given that we are in the era of globalization? We realize that the Internet has fostered global businesses, but at the same time, it enables us to create rich information spaces for everyday life. While the Internet makes businesses global, life is inherently local. Business requires homogeneous settings to allow global and fair competition, while daily life can remain heterogeneous reflecting our different cultural backgrounds. If differences exist in business, standard protocols are needed to overcome them, but we do not need any standard for social interaction. If the differences are significant, we should develop support tools for intercultural communication. Table 1. Two Extremes in Internet Use Business Everyday Life