I ran the US part of this large, cross-cultural study by Isbister and Nakanishi, in which subjects in the US and in Japan interacted with each other in "FreeWalk" - a shared three-dimensional virtual space - in real-time. The study looked at many factors of the interaction, including the ability of an embodied agent to help subjects overcome intercultural barriers and lack of common ground. Results were presented at CHI2000.