Tokyo Virtual Living Lab: Designing Smart Cities Based on the 3D Internet

The Tokyo Virtual Living Lab is an experimental space based on 3D Internet technology that lets researchers conduct controlled driving and travel studies, including those involving multiple users in the same shared space. This shared-use feature is crucial for analyzing interactive driving behaviors in future smart cities. The lab's novelty is two-fold: it outputs a semantically enriched graphical navigation network using free map data as input, and it includes a navigation segment agent that coordinates a multiagent traffic simulator. This simulator, which is based on the navigation network, supports the integration of user-controlled vehicles. The lab's approach can significantly reduce the effort of preparing realistic driving behavior studies. To demonstrate this, the authors built a 3D model of a part of Tokyo to perform experiments with human drivers in two conditions: normal traffic and ubiquitous eco-traffic.