When you think of VR where does your mind go? Is it an ultra-realistic video game providing the complete entertainment experience? Or maybe it’s being able to view the Grand Canyon while sitting in your living room. But what about putting on a headset and going to work?

The Cornell Virtual Embodiment Lab is asking questions about collaboration and competition, something anyone with a 9-5 job is all too familiar with.

So why should you care about this? Well, if you’ve had to travel for work meeting you may want to pay attention. Companies spend a total of $111.7 billion a year in domestic travel for conventions, meetings, and training purposes. However, as VR technology becomes more advanced some of these trips may not be needed. Instead of flying to corporate headquarters employees could simply meet in a virtual space. This would save valuable resources in time, money, and fuel expenses that come with travel.

This study was headed by Yilu Sun, who came to the lab as a MPS student in Information Science.  Her experiment was inspired by an earlier study that tracked movement of participants in collaborating pairs to predict their success at a collaborative task.