monotremata
Sound doesn’t travel as far through warm humid air, so the world feels a little more muted and calm. (Contrast this with the dry, dense air of a frigid winter day, when the sound of cars carries for miles as a dull growl.) The light is almost entirely diffuse thanks to clouds, rather than the sharp glare of a sunny day; your skin isn’t dried out and burned in the same way either. Public spaces aren’t as crowded. Indoor rooms are often lighted more gently as well without sharp sunbeams drawing lines. Add the sound of rain itself and the faint smell of petrichor, and the improvement in the air quality as the rain washes particulate and pollen into the gutters, and you get a perfect day to curl up with a book, a cup of tea, and a cat on your lap.
“No, I am not going with you to a concert in the park! There’s a zombie horde out there! We’ll get bitten!”
“Hey, even the WHO says it’s not an apocalypse anymore. The zombies are endemic now. You can’t live your life in fear.”
“Your mom was eaten by zombies literally last week.”
“Yeah but she had diabetes. There’s always gonna be people with preexisting conditions who are gonna be more vulnerable.”
“At least wear your denim jacket to make it harder for them to bite you!”
“There was a study in the Lancet that said heavy clothes don’t work.”
“You know full well that what they found was that requiring heavy clothes didn’t work because people just got bitten at the times when they weren’t wearing them.”
“The author himself said jackets don’t work.”
“He said that after he was bitten and just before demanding our brains!”
“Okay, sheeple. Oh, hey Mom. We’re just heading out to the concert.”
“Wait, your mom is here? I thought she was…”
“BRAAAAIINSSS…”
“You LET HER BACK IN after she died and came back as a zombie!?”
“Dude, she’s not infectious anymore. She caught it like four days ago.”
“That is NOT how this works! What… DON’T HUG HER!”
“Bye Mom, love you…ow!”
“She just bit you, didn’t she.”
“Nah, I’m fine. Let’s go to the concert.”
The code name of the first Steam Box, before it was released, was Piston, which fits the theme pretty well. e.g. https://www.polygon.com/2013/1/7/3849284/piston-valve-steam-box-xi3
I don’t think it’s most yet, but it’s improving fast thanks to the Valve Steam Deck. Bazzite is probably the distro to look at for a machine that’s primarily for gaming; it’s based on the Steam Deck OS, but works on more machines. There are some high-profile games like Fortnite that won’t run on it, but a lot of stuff will, especially if it doesn’t rely on any fancy anti-cheat stuff.
Yeah, I’ve thought about this, but I think you need more than one degree of freedom for the chair to help with motion sickness. Like, if your character is in a car and accelerates, you need to tilt (pitch) backwards a bit, to emulate the way the acceleration pushes you back into your seat on the car (well, really it’s the corresponding motion in the inner ear we need to worry about, but a tilt is the correct solution for both). When you go around a corner, it needs to tilt (roll) sideways a bit, to match the feeling of being pulled to the outside of the turn by centrifugal force. Etc. Those are the forces our inner ears are expecting, and without those, there’s still a mismatch. And even with the hardware to do those movements, you need software to calculate the right motions ahead of time so you can reach the right positions in time to match the visuals, which is also quite difficult, and makes it pretty hard to picture doing this as a peripheral rather than as an integrated system. And the cost would be prohibitive.
Honestly I think we may not get this until we can fake it all with electrical signals to the brain, which is quite a long way off.