This PhD work aims to improve the collaboration between users: we propose some new models for designing collaborative virtual environments to deal with the distributed architecture, but also to integrate some new metaphors for the collaboration. To ensure that all users have the same state of the virtual environment at the same time, we propose a first model to dynamically adapt the data distribution on the network. We also propose a second software architecture model which clearly separates the data of the virtual environment from the network layer and from the users' specific components. To enable several users using different material devices to collaborate, we describe a third model which integrate the users in the virtual environment by taking account of their real environment. In the context of the ANR Collaviz project, these three models make possible to design a new framework that can be used to realize some experimentations of remote collaboration.
