Speaking of which, I could really go for some cupcake in a cup right now...~

But I live in America. Most short range travel doesn't even get you to the nearest grocer. If you can actually get anywhere by walking, you live in the urban core of a major city.

The Axiom is--by virtue of it being a cruise ship--essentially an ultra-dense city with a giant propulsion system strapped to it. It's probably around 4 km long, if you include the narrow pointy bits, with some minor convolution of the major pedestrian travel routes. In the early "cabin fever" years of the cruise, walking around everywhere was likely a common occurrence. But as new generations replace the old, distance expectations readjust. 100m becomes a long way to walk, because it is 2.5% the length of your world, and might take you two whole minutes if you stroll leisurely enough. Those are minutes you would have to be watching the interactive teledramas of the ship's integrated entertainment system on your tiny wearable screen, when it could be on a much larger, more immersive display!

The hoverchairs of the Axiom weren't just about not walking; they were also about being connected to the network 24-7, like Borg or Cybermen. Recall how extraordinary it was for Wall-E to get just two of the humans to notice that something interesting and different was happening away from their screens, in the real world. And they were excited about it, because they had never meaningfully explored the "real" world in their entire lifetime ("I didn't know we had a pool!"), so it was all new to them, and rendered in perfect photorealistic quality, with no level qeometry errors or frame-dropping.

Ready Player One is coming to theater screens soon, and if there were any justice in the world, Snow Crash would be, too. Humanity has this dream of connecting everyone to everyone else through the network, and it also has a nightmare where the network is an addictive drug, and everyone becomes a netjunkie and lets the real world become a barren wasteland.

Distance sucks. The great burden of civilization is that moving goods around takes time, because between where they are and where we want them to be, there's just so much distance. The mere proposal that treadmill shoes should exist for VR is an indication that world programmers are doing a stupid thing. They are importing the thing that many people hate about the real world, and making it a hard rule of the simulated world, too. You would be better off strapping a vibrating belt to your waist; let it buzz whenever you fire the thrusters on your powered exoskeleton, and give yourself a tiny shock whenever you activate a teleporter or traverse a portal. People want instant travel, and you don't need simulated walking for that.

The network generates a new distance expectation. The world is now zero meters across. Stepping from New York to London is a journey of milliseconds rather than miles. Whether the world is 4 km long, or 40000 km around, walking just can't compete with that. If you can go anywhere interesting faster than you can walk to your mailbox, pedestrian travel is just doomed. Even mechanized travel is doomed. That's why delivery services like Amazon are booming. For brick-and-mortar stores, you have to spend 15 minutes on traversing distance before you can even start shopping. And that store might not even have what you want.