In real life, the ability that people have of observing the elements of their surrounding space contributes for the sense of presence and social co-presence in that physical space. Digital avatars are often the employed means for providing a similar sense of co-presence in virtual environments. Digital avatars of the users and other co-presence amplification strategies (e.g., co-presence inducing graphical representations) have been extensively studied and employed in multi-player videogames. This paper studies the application of some these strategies to amplify the senseofco-presence of people in virtual group house visits, which is an application scenario with value for real estate industry and participatory design in architecture. For this purpose, a Unity-based collaborative virtual environment was implemented and tested in a user study with 33 participants. The obtained results show that the implemented strategies enrich the sense of co-presence in the virtual environment and trigger interesting collaborative interactions.

--