Embedding the features of the users' physical environments to improve the feeling of presence in collaborative Virtual Environments

The feeling of presence is essential for efficient interaction within Virtual Environments (VE). When a user is fully immersed within a VE through a large display system such as a big CAVE™, his feeling of presence can be altered because of disturbing interactions with his physical environment, such as collision with hardware parts of the system or loss of tracking. This alteration can be avoided by taking into account the physical features of the user and to embed them in the VE. Moreover, the 3D representation of these physical features can also be useful for collaboration between distant users because they can make a user aware of the physical limitations of the other users they are collaborating with. In this paper we present how we use the Immersive Interactive Virtual Cabin (IIVC) model to obtain this virtual representation of the physical environment of the user and we illustrate how it can be used to guide efficiently a user for a navigation task in a VE.