Imagine a small town where neighbors discuss not only the weather in the morning, but also how a robot behaved yesterday. Toyota has launched just such an experiment at the foot of Mount Fuji.
Woven City is a real residential district where Toyota engineers, test users and their families live. For now, only a few hundred people live here, but there are noticeably more robots and new technologies. In effect, this district has been turned into a huge open-air laboratory. Robots, artificial intelligence, autonomous and electric transport, new ways of delivering goods and other urban technologies are being tested here. And they are tested not in a sterile lab, but in ordinary life: people walk nearby, cars drive past, families live here — and they show how well all this works together.
The main idea of Woven City is simple: technologies should learn to live alongside people. Successful solutions can then be transferred to ordinary cities. And this Japanese district will keep changing and will be joined by new experiments.
So the future has not arrived yet. It seems to have moved in near Fuji — and is now going through a probation period together with the robots.
