Issues in message passing for a tele-immersive experience

Tele-immersion is one of the applications being developed in conjunction with the Internet-2 initiative. Most of the research in this area has focused on issues pertaining to image acquisition and display, tracking technologies, robotics, haptics, etc. In order to maintain consistency of a tele-immersive experience one also needs to develop a suit of solutions that will ensure proper coordination between the participants. This will require protocols for real-time causal delivery of messages while maintaining the privacy of conversations and preventing forgery of message contents. This paper discusses these issues while considering a tele-immersive environment as a distributed message passing system