DIGITAL MEDIA STREET

The new Digital Media Technology Laboratory

2 SEOUL DIGITAL MEDIA STREET 4 A LIVING LABORATORY AND A GREAT STREET 6 BUILDING PA RTNERSHIP FOR THE FUTURE 8 LAYERS OF TECHNOLOGY 12 A WALK ON THE DIGITAL MEDIA STREET

Digital Media Street

the World s First Ubiquitous Boulevard
Welcome you all to a street that has never been created anywhere in the world! Korea boasts the finest information and communications network. Based on the network, the nation is constructing the Digital Media City(DMC), a project aimed at turning the vast, underdeveloped expanse of land in the northwestern part of Seoul City into a land of opportunity. The project revolves around three visions as follows : to shape a prime development and production center for digital media contents, to foster a university-research-industry center of digital media technology, and to create Northeast Asias best business hub.

The DMC will be a "city within a city". It will embrace innovative environments and concepts unexplored to date. In the years to come, the DMC will develop into a Mecca of new technology and innovative business by developing and commercializing numerous, if not all, kinds of digital media including movie, animation, music and cyber contents. In addition, the DMC will open a new chapter for human civilization by projecting future lifestyles into the reality.

The Digital Media Street(DMS), the central boulevard of the DMC, will emerge as the worlds first-ever ubiquitous street where never-seen-before digital media products will be displayed, experienced and experimented. The Street is designed to support daily life, leisure and entertainment all in one place. Cutting-edge media technologies will surely transform the DMS into a living laboratory and marketplace capable of blending work and life properly. I am sure the potential of digital media technology carried by the Street will provide fresh ideas as to how digital media can change the way we live and conduct business.

Indeed, the Digital Media Street will embrace the full potential of pioneering digital technologies. I cordially invite you to come and see for yourself limitless opportunities offered by the DMS.

Thank you.

Lee Myung Bak Mayor of Seoul

SEOUL DIGITAL MEDIA STREET

In the vibrant capital of the world s most wired nation, a new kind of 21st century place is taking shape. Situated on the last undeveloped expanse of land in Seoul, South Korea, the Digital Media City will be a totally new environment for innovation, and a place where tomorrow s digital media products and contents will be envisioned, incubated, tested and marketed. This new city within a city will be a gateway linking Seoul with the world, both through cutting-edge transport facilities and state-of-the-art communications infrastructure. It will be a place where

technology combines with advanced R&D capabilities and human capital to create the globe s boldest experiment in a living, learning community.

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At the heart of this new city is the Digital Media Street, the area s boulevard. Digital Media Street will be a living laboratory of tomorrow s life styles served by blending technologies and physical amenities. It will provide a fully inhabited test bed for new concepts marrying culture, work, entertainment, lifestyle and media technology.

The streets of many cities are already full of media images and sensations. Seoul s Myeong-dong, Tokyo s Ginza, Manhattan s Times Square and London s Piccadilly Circus are just a few of the well known commercial streets ablaze with signs and lights, showering those who walk on them with information and sensation. And on any busy street, scores of people transform the public environment into their own, self-controlled media zones as they talk with one another, or send letter massages through their cell phones and enjoy personalized entertainment, piped into their ears from card sized concert halls in their pocket.

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A LIVING LABORATORY AND A GREAT STREET

But the digital media revolution has yet to fully engage our landscape and the people who use it. To date these media are largely dumb projecting information outward and they do not interact with the recipient or each other. What lies ahead is the potential to link these technologies and blend them into the everyday life of our public streets and plazas. The interface between place and cyberspace will create a new kind of place, a third domain, that will serve the people as they move from one point to another, come to the street to be entertained or to socialize, or as they use the street as an extension of where they work, reside, learn, shop or are entertained. Also, digital media technologies will enhance the management of utilities and traffic flows that allow streets to function.

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The Digital Media Street addresses two challenges. As the main street of one of Asia s global business centers, it will strive to be a great street designed to please the thousands of people who use it every day. The Street will provide visual stimulation, a variety of experiences, and opportunities to engage with and to help shape the personal and community environment. And, as an integral part of the Digital Media City, whose tenants will shape digital medial technology and its applications , the Street will serve as a place to rehearse technologies, activities and engagements with the future. All of this can be tried, practiced and, if useful, integrated into ongoing activities. What exactly will be created is difficult to envision because the ideas are as yet unborn. But since glimpses of the future are always here, we can anticipate early uses that will be played out in the Street and its parks, plazas and adjacent buildings. As a laboratory the Street will evolve as we move into the future, sometimes radically as new technologies and new ideas about what to do with this technology emerge and are tried.

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BUILDING PARTNERSHIP FOR THE FUTURE

Public and private enterprises, schools, community groups and individuals walking on the street or pausing in one of its places will influence, if not create, the events, sensations and activities of this laboratory street. Large companies will bid for use of space on the street, and its cyber portals. Start-up firms, students and even Seoul residents will have incentives to bring innovation to the Street.

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Partnerships will be formed by public and private organizations and all involved parties will seek alliances as they seek to create the future. But the Street will remain flexible, allowing new ideas to replace the old-here, age may be judged in years, months, days or even minutes. To allow continuous improvement, The Street will be managed to be agile and driven by those who use it as well as those who shape its components. The Digital Media City and its flagship main street are driven by bold visions but their future builds from existing bedrock. Seoul which already has a significant cluster of digital media enterprises with global reputation, is the most wired city in the world, has the highest rate of broadband wireless penetration and has residents who are already innovators and users of digital media technology. This existing infrastructure will be integral to the creation of the Digital Media Street through partnerships.

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LAYERS OF TECHNOLOGY

Many of the technologies envisioned for the street are already available or are being developed around the world. The aim on the Digital Media Street is to bring them together in an experimental public environment to see what develops in new uses, activities, behaviors, and physical forms. In general, media in the public environment will be available at three levels of interaction:

Personal level, involving wireless communications through cell phones, digital assistants, or portable computing devices. Street level, embedded in or connecting to physical objects, places, public display devices, and sensing. Cyber level, involving meta-sources of aggregated data, monitoring, and programming that support activities on the street and are available to its users.

Places of the third domain will emerge out of interactions among these dimensions to produce new types of experiences.

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Research at MIT has identified six major themes of experience and activity that will eventually exist on mature mediated streets, each supported by combinations of personal, street level, and cyber information: 1. Maintenance. Water, power, trash, security and information utilities have already been made highly intelligent in several cities, allowing maintenance personnel to pinpoint and fix problems without opening the street. In the future, intelligent street lighting and fixtures that provide comfort, such as protection from rain or sun, will sense the weather, time of day, number of people and cars and adjust their services accordingly.

2. Movement. The flow of cars and buses is already monitored by digital means in many cities. On the Digital Media Street, pavement markings, signs, and traffic signals will work together with GPS navigation systems in private cars to maximize efficient movement and minimize the search for parking. Bus stops will provide information about routes and timing that may be continuously updated to meet demand.

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3. Place information. Information about the Street, its history, activities, contents, and context in the city will be available to orient visitors, teach school children, and keep residents up-to-date. This will be delivered personally through cell phones and PDAs, on the street in special kiosks, via signage that can be programmed to carry any message, or digital portals that can connect to images of any place. In such ways, the street will tell its own story

4. Transactions. Already, a great deal of buying and selling occurs in people s homes, but people still like the experience of shopping. In the future, all of the street will become a medium for exchange mingling the sales floor and the street floor. Building facades will be media, displaying merchandise, messages, or mood. Thin shops will let people feel the goods and have purchases delivered to their homes. Products that people wear or use will advertise themselves on your PDA or tabletop: Did you know you were sitting next to a pair of Nike Supersonics?

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5. Meetings. Work is now moving out of the workplace as people use their laptops in parks and on playgrounds. In the future, the public environment will accommodate more diverse uses and greater levels of social interaction in the course of shopping, dining, entertainment or waiting for the bus, supported by wireless digital access and displays built into the environment. This will provide the setting for ways of building communities, doing business and meeting people. Did you know that someone across the street wants to meet you?

6. Magic. Today, people flock to Times Square to see the collection of individual signs. Imagine if they could all be coordinated. Tomorrow, public media in all of its forms will be integrated, potentially becoming a vast palette for expressions of mood, memory and magic. On Christmas day, all signs could be rendered in red and green; on New Year s Eve, they might sparkle; during the World Cup they could show the final moments; and on memorial days, they could go blank. The potential of the street to support artistic expression and new kinds of civic events will be unparalleled in history and could lead to a reemergence of public life.

The transformation of the street is already underway in cities worldwide. Seoul has proposed to kick-start the process by overlaying an aspect of each of the above themes on the Digital Media Street. We cannot predict, but only imagine what a day on the Street would be like.

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A WALK ON THE DIGITAL MEDIA STREET

I was early for my 8 P.M. dinner meeting with Young Jin. So I asked the taxi driver to drop me at the beginning of the Street. It was a nice evening and I wanted to enjoy the cool air. At the information booth I picked up a smart key chain with the DMC s image on it. This smart ID is connected to my credit card for any charges that I make or fees that I have to pay in establishments throughout the DMC. All I have to do is point and click, nothing to sign, no numbers to punch in. It is also my personal ID while I am in the DMC and anyone to whom I give my personal ID number can find me through their mobile phones or PDAs while I visit the DMC.

I activated the Location Context on my PDA and immediately viewed some of the activities that were happening on the Street that evening. I saw that a large crowd of mostly young people was gathered around the Sister Wall, which connects to Seouls cities around the world. A number of them were dancing in mirror image to other young people on a large screen they located somewhere in the world. It looked as if they might be in Oahu. I also saw that the digital game plaza was full of spectators watching the Korean semi-finals for those who would be eligible to represent Korea at the internal competition. I scrolled down the screen to get a preview of the exhibits in the galleries on the Street and found an exhibit about Tibetan art that I wanted to see and then I strolled down the Street to the location noted on the screen. It was several blocks off the main Street.

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The people in the plaza were themselves art for one another, as a technician inside a nearby building used a hand held computer to "color" the crowd. Switching virtually instantaneously among more than a million shades of color, he animated the crowd even though they were standing still. Random people were captured by Webcams and avatars of their images were projected onto the walls of surrounding buildings. These same types of light were used, although less spectacularly, in the Street s traffic lights which used 80 percent less energy and last 10 times as long as typical light bulbs. The solar lighted pavers are self-contained with a soft inviting glow.

I noticed that the Knowledge Board, the large sign on one of the buildings at the beginning of the Street, was glowing blue with a number of vertical lines pulsating, showing that the inflow and outflow of information for the Digital Media Street had been intense that day. The pulsating lines reflected that activity continued even though the Korean business day was over, probably reflecting the information coming in from the United States and Europe.

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I knew immediately that there was going to be a concert in the outdoor entertainment plaza further up the Street because every five minutes, the first floor level signs on the shops that lined the Street switched on in unison, providing views of previous concerts in the plaza and previews of the groups that were going to perform this evening.

They began to open up at different angles and project light and information onto the Street. One projected an advertisement for a day spa. Another projected

images of dancing fish in a pool, which looked so real that I walked around it rather than across. My favorite was the little orange one that not only projected an

advertisement for a very creamy brand of ice cream but seemed to emit a mango flavor around it -- I decided what I wanted to have after dinner, and pointed my PDA at the advertisement to record the location of the dessert shop.

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I got to the restaurant on time, but Young Jin was not yet there. Seated at a table for two, I browsed the electronic menu built into the table and noticed that one of my favorite fish dishes was featured But to be sure it was what I wanted, I touched

the picture of the dish on the screen to review the spices that the chef was using that night. I was delighted to find that it was prepared just the way I wanted it. I ordered a glass of wine and then looked around. The group of four sitting at the table next ordered fast food to take away and used their smart key to pay by touching it to the images of what they had just ordered. Nearby, a woman was eating dumplings with one hand and using the other to play Internet checkers on the board in front of her. Her unseen opponent, whom I guessed she had never met, was playing from somewhere in the world, perhaps at a nearby table or in a restaurant in Moscow, in a cafe in Toronto or at home in Delhi. Young Jin had still not arrived. So I scrolled down the display of newspaper available on the table s electronic screen until I found the English language one I wanted, opened it and turned to the features section.

Finally, Young Jin arrived and we ordered dinner. Along with our appetizers and entrees, we also ordered the visual portal of the grape garden in Italy from where our red wine came. We decided to have dessert in the restaurant (my desired mango ice cream would have to wait for another day) and shared the very large, mixed tropical fruit plate. When the plate came, a visual portal of a tropical forest opened on the table. I was not sure if the visions of the colorful, exotic birds and sounds of their music was live or prerecorded. As Young Jin finished his glass of wine, an amused smile crossed his face and he toasted to his dinner in Seoul, which included visits to Tuscany and Tahiti, with a friend from New York --- all done within two hours.

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After dinner, we took the DMC shuttle to Young Jins office where we had to retrieve some papers. A visual display on one wall of the smart bus stop transmitted the route and an updated schedule of the bus. Another wall provided displays to engage the traveler in creative or information based activities while waiting. In front of one screen, several people played video games while another screen ran short segments of movies playing in Seouls downtown theaters. On a third wall was a changing display of electronic art.

We noticed that now there are only two lanes on the road, instead of 4 during the day. The released spaces on the road had turned into side walk for pedestrians with digital directions on them.

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Along the Street on which Young Jins office was located, I noticed a window with a tic-tac-toe game with very realistic looking chickens and eggs. Two of the chickens turned their heads to me and invited us to play the game. As we approached, we could see that our little friends were holograms (Young Jin won two of the three games we played). Further down the Street, there were some other games in shop windows; they were related to the themes of the shops. There were crowds around these, so we could not get close enough to look at them. But I was surprised to see that at least half of the very active players were adult businessmen wearing suits.

We arrived at his office around 10 P.M. There are few people on the street, but there is a crowd of people on the screen at the entrance of the building, some of whom I recognize as Young Jins colleagues. After we pass a certain point, our images also appear on the screen (Although I have been here several times, I still cannot figure out exactly where the sensor is). Our images are slightly brighter than those of others, indicating that we have just arrived. Some images are fading, suggesting that they have just left the building.

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There are several shining beams of blue light at the entrance. As Chang Bok? stretches out his hand, the blue light "feels" to be blocked. It gets more intense and a log-in interface appears on his palm. After he is pushes several figurative buttons on his hand, the door opens and the blue light becomes dim and the log-in diminishes i n t oa i r .

After leaving his office and getting back onto the Street, I touch my smart key to the taxi symbol on my PDA and a car appears within five minutes. As we drive out of the DMC and head toward downtown, just 20 minutes away this time of night, we pass through the DMC s quiet, high-rise residential area that looks like any modern development in many cities. But I know that the residents of this area are the most "electronically connected in the world", with 100 percent of the apartments connected to broadband and most key areas have direct access to WiFi. Inside these buildings people are electronically connected all the time and to everywhere. School homework, work brought home from the office, cooking, health care monitoring, entertainment and communication with friends and family are all supported through the power of the Internet and wireless connections that are as fast as any in the world. People who live and work in the DMC live in a world that blends physical and cyber space.

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P roject P ro j e c t History H i s t o r y
1992 Unveiling of Master Plan for Strategic Development of 5 Centers (Yeouido, Yongsan, Sangam, Ttukseom, and Magok) celebrating 600th anniversary of Seouls foundation as Koreas capital Announcement of a plan to transform Sangam into Seouls new future northwestern business center Announcement of the site for Seoul World Cup Stadium and Infrastructure Plan for Sangam Area Unveiling of New Seoul Town Development Plan - a comprehensive regional development plan including hi-speed railline to Incheon International Airport Unveiling of Sangam New Millennium Town Master Plan, encompassing DMC (560,000m2), environment-friendly Eco-Village (7000 household units), and Millennium Park (3,630,000m2) Completion of DMC Master Plan to create a leading city/hosting hi-tech digital media business from fome and abroad Enactment of DMC Promotion Ordinance DMC Launch Forum held and DMC Gallery opened Announcement of 1st Phase DMC Land Supply Completion of IT Infrastructure Master Plan to construct hi-speed information network interconnecting wired, wireless and satellite communications Holding of Digital Media Street (DMS) Workshop Completion of DMC Implementation Strategy Qualified Core-Function area applicants announced Initiation of DMS Master Plan preparation DMS International Forum Completion of DMS Master Plan 1997

1998

1999

2000. 5

2001. 2

2002. 1 2002. 5 2002. 5 2002. 5

2002. 5 2002. 5 2002. 8 2002. 9 2003. 10 2003. 11

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Gerhard Schroeder,
German Chancellor

Germany had the fastest growing IT sector in the world last year except for Koreas. The German government is doing its best to catch up with Korea.

Bill Gates,
Chairman, Microsoft

Korea has done a great job of taking the broadband lead... a lot of the neat new things (in technology) will emerge in Korea first.

Steve Balmer,
CEO, Microsoft

Koreas Internet industry leads the world.

Financial Times

South Korea will be a test bed for Third Generation telecommunications and the type of services that people will use, and be willing to pay for.

James Rooney,
Vice Chairman, Deloitte Consulting, Korea

Koreas infrastructure is going to stimulate software manufacturers to come up with new and better ways to satisfy their audience.

Paul Presler,
Nomura Securities, Korea

Korea has done a better job of restructuring and attracting foreign investment than anyone else in the region.

The Times of London

...bluntness...and a patriotism honed by the division of Korea - makes its hardworking people more resilient and adaptable than their hidebound neighbors. Their instinct in a crisis is to pick themselves up and dust themselves down. However noisily, they get on with what has to be done.

Michael Joroff,
Senior Lecturer, School of Architecture and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Digital Media City will bring together contents and state-ofthe-art technology that will apply across the board - not just to media and entertainment. And it will build on a solid base of accomplishment: Seoul is incredibly focused on the future... everyone is in an incredible rush to move ahead.

Jeffrey Jones,
Former President, American Chamber of Commerce in Korea

Truly, Korea is where all the action is in Asia right now...Digital Media City will be built, and it will be occupied.

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Digital Media City Division Seoul Metropolitan Government Taepyeongro 1-Ga 31, Jung-gu, Seoul, Korea 100-744 Phone : 82-2-3707-9871~81 Fax : 82-2-3707-8723 URL : www.dmc.seoul.kr E-mail : dmc@seoul.go.kr