Motivation – To design virtual environments that support collaborative activities. Research approach – An experimental approach in which 44 students were asked to work in pairs to reconstruct five 3D figures. Findings/Design – The results show that including a contextual clue in virtual environments improves collaboration between operators. Research limitations – Further investigative work must be carried out to extract accurate female collaboration profiles. Originality/Value – The results enable three collaboration profiles to be identified. They also allow the extraction of some characteristics of a contextual clue which can be added to a virtual environment to improve collaboration. Take away message – The contents of a collaborative virtual environment influences the way that users collaborate.