Abstract: Recent research has concentrated on the question how virtual characters (‚agents’) and their set of reaction can be enhanced to better suit a certain purpose in a virtual reality environment (VRE). Another field of active research is augmented reality (AR), where computer generated graphics is superimposed over a real world image. Thus AR is able to add detail and enhance the underlying information. Our idea is to create an augmented reality environment (ARE) with an agent and thus overcome some the drawbacks of agent-based VREs. The question we answer here is how collaboration with an avatar is perceived by users in both types of reality (VRE & ARE). Those will be evaluated against each other and a real persons’ conversation. Additionally we want to find certain criteria which facilitate the collaboration among the subjects or which help to accomplish the given task. Our aim is to show that this technique is especially advantageous in tasks involving collaboration like prototyping in distributed environments.