Situated Engagement and Virtual Services in a Smart City

In the northern city of Oulu, Finland, we have been pursuing a visible change to the local society by building a functional prototype of what we call an open ubiquitous city. Today the ubiquitous city offers various permanent services as well as short-term research probes for its dwellers to use. In this article we first describe the still fermenting vision behind much of the service development in Oulu. Second, we introduce three new technological concepts that we are currently investigating in the smart city context: situated kiosks for community engagement, sound-based resource discovery mechanism, and a complete, functional 3D-model of the pivotal downtown areas of Oulu. Finally, we discuss some of the future research directions and implications of the introduced technological additions. We hope the ideas shared in this article can help the research community in designing and creating better services for the future cities.