Helsinki Arena 2000 - Augmenting a Real City to a Virtual One

Helsinki Arena 2000 is a large consortium project headed by Helsinki Telephone Corporation. It has been running since early 1996. The main goal of the project is to provide the citizens of Helsinki an enabling platform through an affordable high bandwidth multimedia network in the year 2000. The project consists of three simultaneous development processes. The first process develops and tests services and user interfaces to them integrating the results of many national and international multimedia research projects. The second process creates an easy user interface to the services through a real 3D model of the city of Helsinki. This gives us many possibilities in augmenting the real city and provides a totally new viewpoint to the large web information systems. Finally, the multimedia network which already works in some areas of the city is being extended to other areas. Unlike other networks that provide high bandwidth from the service provider into the homes, this multimedia network is the first commercial network which is capable of transmitting guaranteed good quality video between any two homes. This gives the citizens many new possibilities for communicating with each other as well as with the local communities and businesses. Furthermore, homes connected to multimedia network are able to transmit video up to thousands of other homes.