In 1990s, as a platform for community networks, information spaces using the city metaphor were being developed around the world. I started working on digital cities to create a social information infrastructure for urban everyday life (including shopping, business, transportation, education, welfare and so on). We were in the middle of a long term project to develop a digital city for Kyoto, the old capital and cultural center of Japan, based on the newest technologies including GIS, 3D, animation, agents and mobile computing.
Kyoto was the capital of Japan for more than a thousand years, and has been a cultural center of Japan for even longer. To begin a digital city project for Kyoto, we started with its design policies. The first policy for designing Digital City Kyoto was to make the digital city real by establishing a strong connection to physical Kyoto. Digital city Kyoto complements the corresponding physical city, and provides an information center for everyday life for actual urban communities. We thought digital and physical make things real. We thus worked on a digital part of the real city. The second design policy is to make the digital city live by dynamically integrating WEB archives and real-time sensory information created in the city. Digital City Kyoto did not produce contents nor select them. We provided a tool for viewing and reorganizing digital activities created by people in the city. We proposed the three layer architecture for digital cities: a) the information layer integrates both Web archives and real-time sensory information related to the city, b) the interface layer provides 2D and 3D views of the city, and c) the interaction layer assists social interaction among people who are living/visiting in/at the city.
The project for Digital City Kyoto was established in October of 1998. In August 1999, the Digital City Kyoto Experiment Forum was launched. The forum included several universities, local authorities, leading computer companies, as well as local companies, temples, photographers, volunteers and so on. Researchers and designers from overseas joined the project. Besides technological problems, we encountered numerous non-technical research issues such as security, privacy, and intellectual property rights. To gain a better understanding of the big picture of digital cities, we held the International Workshop on Digital Cities. The attendees included Helsinki, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Shanghai, Turin, Bristol, Oulu, and Kyoto.
Project: Universal Design of Digital City
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Publications:
- Hideyuki Nakanishi, Chikara Yoshida, Toshikazu Nishimura and Toru Ishida. FreeWalk: A 3D Virtual Space for Casual Meetings. IEEE Multimedia, Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 20-28, 1999.
- Toru Ishida and Katherine Isbister Eds. Digital Cities: Experiences, Technologies and Future Perspectives. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, State-of-the-Art Survey, 1765, Springer-Verlag, 2000. ISBN 3540672656.
- Toru Ishida. Digital City Kyoto: Social Information Infrastructure for Everyday Life. Communications of the ACM (CACM), Vol. 45, No. 7, pp. 76-81, 2002.
- Toru Ishida. Q: A Scenario Description Language for Interactive Agents. IEEE Computer, Vol. 35, No. 11, pp. 54-59, 2002.
- Mika Yasuoka, Toru Ishida and Alessandro Aurigi. The Advancement of World Digital Cities. Nakashima, Hideyuki; Aghajan, Hamid; Augusto, Juan Carlos (Eds.) Handbook of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments, pp. 939-958, Springer-Verlag, 2009.
- Toru Ishida. Digital City, Smart City and Beyond. International ACM Smart City Workshop (AW4City), International World Wide Web Conference, pp.1151-1152, keynote talk, 2017.
Toru Ishida 