An interesting ZDNet article by Larry Dignan yesterday described Songdo, South Korea, which is aiming to be a global business hub and a sustainable city. This new city is being developed on 1,500 acres of reclaimed land in South Korea along Incheon’s waterfront, 40 miles from Seoul.

Songdo is also being wired by Cisco as a “grand telepresence experiment.”

According to Marthin De Beer, senior vice president of Cisco Systems’ emerging technology group:

Every home will have a Telepresence unit built in like a dishwasher. And it’s the developer that is putting those into those apartments as they get built out, because that is how education, health care and government services will get delivered right into the home. It will come to you. You don’t have to go find it. And that is how they will reduce traffic congestion and pollution in the cities. …

Until you’ve tasted it, it’s hard for me to explain to you what it’s like. But you can literally sit back on the couch and see your friends and family in life-size, full high definition, right in your living room, and interact with them. It’s not a small computer screen. You get a full view of everyone. And it’s very different.

But that is just 10% of why I’m excited about it, because the other 90% is that I believe it will do what the browser did for commerce into your home. You used to drive down the street to buy things. Today you go online, and it arrives at your doorstep once you’ve purchased it.

Home telepresence would do the same for services. Today, you still go to see your banker, your lawyer, your accountant, your tutor, etc. Well, what if these services can come in a virtual model right into your home and you can consume them in that way?

OK.   Sounds cool.  I have an appointment to visit my doctor on Monday afternoon.  It would be nice to visit him electronically.  But in order to make that work, it would need to accommodate things like weight, temperature, O2 and blood pressure measurements – all by remote control. How would that work?

It will be interesting to see how this works in South Korea … I’m looking forward to getting on the bandwagon in Mesa, AZ.