Korea’s plans for Ubicomp City
Korea has amazingly high penetration rates for broadband and cellular service. It’s cheap, fast, and widely available, and has been for several years now. This has made Korea a lead market for trying out new wireless and online services. Streaming broadcast and video-on-demand for all national networks is the norm. Next up: building a centrally planned, wired city called New Songdo, which will implement many of the ubiquitous / pervasive computing ideas that have been floating around for a while but never attempted at this scale:
A ubiquitous city is where all major information systems (residential, medical, business, governmental and the like) share data, and computers are built into the houses, streets and office buildings. New Songdo, located on a man-made island of nearly 1,500 acres off the Incheon coast about 40 miles from Seoul, is rising from the ground up as a U-city.
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In the West, ubiquitous computing is a controversial idea that raises privacy concerns and the specter of a surveillance society. (They’ll know whether I recycled my Coke bottle?!) But in Asia the concept is viewed as an opportunity to show off technological prowess and attract foreign investment.
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“New Songdo sounds like it will be one big Petri dish for understanding how people want to use technology,” said B. J. Fogg, the director of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University.If so, it is an experiment much easier to do in Asia than in the West.
“Much of this technology was developed in U.S. research labs, but there are fewer social and regulatory obstacles to implementing them in Korea,” said Mr. Townsend, who consulted on Seoul’s own U-city plan, known as Digital Media City. “There is an historical expectation of less privacy. Korea is willing to put off the hard questions to take the early lead and set standards.”
I think projects like these are going to need something like the AttentionTrust Recorder, or at least an OFF button, to let people see what’s being monitored about themselves and to manage how the information is made available. Without it, this might be a really cool place to visit but not somewhere you’d want to live.
(via TechDirt)
Tags: korea, ubicomp, privacy, urbanplanning
