Once reserved for virtual environments, avatars are now increasingly present in Augmented Reality (AR). This technology allows interacting with virtual content directly integrated into our physical surroundings. Combined with body tracking, it makes it possible to experience being inside a virtual body of any desired appearance and to extend one’s action capabilities. Despite the numerous opportunities for applications that this new possibility provides, little research has explored how to implement and exploit it. The way users perceive such experiences within real environments is additionally not well understood yet. In this thesis, we explore the embodiment of avatars in AR through several axes. First, we introduce a taxonomy through a body avatarization continuum to better describe embodiment experiences. Next, using an optical see-through AR display, we study the user’s sense of embodiment towards virtual hands and how mixing the virtual with the real impacts this sense. We then look at the use cases for avatar embodiment in AR and investigate interaction techniques allowing us to control avatars in the third person and to explore the real world. We propose an implementation of this concept and evaluate the approach of using such a system to improve our perception of real-world affordances through a user study. Finally, we explore strategies to enhance embodiment illusions by designing transitions to become one’s avatar and methods to prepare the user for their “avatarization”.