Within Virtual Reality Environments (VREs), spatial relationships among objects convey fundamental knowledge about the environment, namely direction ("left", "right", "front of"), distance ("near", "far"), topology ("inside", "disjoint"), and projection ("between", "surrounded by"). Modelling spatial relationships is critical in a variety of applications of VREs, such as human learning environments, virtual museums, or navigation-aids systems. However, spatial relationships have been considered as abstract information and thus, difficult to specify. Addressing this issue, this thesis proposes an approach to model spatial relationships among virtual objects in VREs. First, we formalise a formal model of spatial relationships dedicated to VREs. Second, we provide a language and a framework to specify spatial relationships at a conceptual level. Finally, we apply our model to specify spatial relations in two real applications: Virtual Physics Laboratory -- a VRE for learning physics, and BrestCoz -- an application for visiting Brest harbour in the 18th century. We claim that the proposed language is a relevant basis to specify spatial constraints related to activities of agents and users within VREs.
