Before he shot Titanic, Jim Cameron needed to experience it himself. He invented modern special effects with his work on 2001. Now Douglas Trumbull believes that the future of special effects is beyond movies. City-dwellers tire of the panhandlers and the crowds. Country-dwellers tire of the rednecks and the isolation.
Commuters have to commute.
I remember reading a '50s paperback science-fiction book called The Hedonists. The hero was a boy who found the hedonists's pods. The hedonists were humanoids who lived their whole lives in jellied capsules, intravenously fed, with their brains wired into pleasure-buzzers and communication networks. I remember the disgusting image of a burst-open pod with a twitching larval hedonist lying in a melting pool of slime. In a '90s cyberpunk novel, hedonists would not end up this way.