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Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) aim at providing several users with a consistent shared virtual world. In this work, we focus on the lack of mutual awareness that may appear in many situations and we evaluate different ways to present the distant user and his actions in the Virtual Environment (VE) in order to understand his perception and cognitive process. Indeed, an efficient collaboration involves not only the good perception of some objects but their meaning too. This second criterion introduces the concept of distant analysis that could be a great help in improving the understanding of distant activities. For this work, we focus on a common case consisting in estimating accurately the time at which a distant user analyzed the meaning of a remotely pointed object. Thus, we conduct some experiments to evaluate the concept and compare different techniques for implementing this new awareness feature in a CVE. Amongst others, results show that expertise of the users influences on how they estimate the distant activity and the type of applied strategies.

Les systèmes d'aide embarqués actuels calculent des itinéraires mathématiquement optimum. Mais, les conducteurs préfèrent souvent d'autres itinéraires satisfaisant des critères plus personnels. La recherche présentée dans cet article a pour objectif d'appréhender les aspects cognitifs de l'activité de conception de plans, et plus spécifiquement des itinéraires, et de proposer des spécifications ergonomiques pour la conception d'un système d'aide à la planification d'itinéraires. Nous avons réalisé deux expériences dans lesquelles les participants devaient planifier dans une ville un itinéraire permettant d'effectuer des tâches avec contraintes spatiales et / ou temporelles. Nous avons examiné l'effet de la connaissance de l'environnement, de la durée allouée à la planification et de la présence de contraintes temporelles sur les stratégies et les représentations mises en oeuvre. Sur la base des résultats obtenus et d'une analyse des différents systèmes d'aide existants (non détaillée dans ce texte), nous formulons des pistes pour la conception d'un système d'aide.MOTS CLEFS : Planification d'itinéraires, système embarqué, système d'aide à la navigation, système d'aide à la planification, ergonomie cognitive, psychologie cognitive. ABSTRACTOnboard navigational aid systems are a central topic in the road-transportation domain. The currently available systems are designed so that they usually deliver the « objectively » « optimal » routes. Drivers, however, often prefer other routes due to individual cognitive or motivational reasons. Our research program aims at identifying the cognitive processes involved in route planning, and providing ergonomic specifications for onboard systems dedicated to support drivers' route planning. We conducted two experiments in which participants were asked to plan an itinerary through a city, in which they were expected to complete tasks with spatial or / and temporal constraints. We examined if participants' cognitive activities were affected by specific environment knowledge, by tasks being constrained temporally and by time available for planning. On the basis of these results and of an ergonomic analysis of aid systems, we formulate some directions for the development of a system that might support drivers in their planning activities.