Social networking and context management for the future 3D Internet

Current trends in 3D visualization merged with internet applications and sensor technologies will soon break the barriers to the widespread acceptance of 3D Internet, and they will enable a full user immersion in the virtual world. However this evolution will impact dramatically on the existing infrastructures since the fruition of 3D content in real time by a huge number of people poses new issues related to the system responsiveness and to the ability of managing context information. In this paper we observe that actions related to the acquisition of context from the physical and from the virtual worlds, as well as actuation in both worlds can be considered as a special case of context management and actuation. For this reason we propose an architecture for the management of such aspects within a unique framework, and an experimental testbed that validates the architecture.