Fidelity of the remote partner's avatar in an immersive virtual environment: effects on spatial interactions

Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) are systems that allow multiple participants located remotely to collaborate in a shared virtual space. In order to take advantage of the possibilities offered by such systems, their design must allow users to interact and communicate effectively. One of the open questions in this area concerns the fidelity of the remote partner's avatar. This can indeed have a direct effect on communication between remote users, more particularly regarding spatial interactions. In this paper, we present a theoretical framework to analyze the fidelity of the remote partner's avatar in CVE. We also present an ongoing study to compare the effects of two partner's avatar types on spatial communication. This will permit extracting guidelines for designing CVEs including pointing and spatial guidance tasks.