In your darkest, wettest, virtual reality fantasy your digital doppelganger flies through fantastic landscapes in pursuit of killer info. But what about your meat body? What's up with that? If Brian Park gets his wish your carcass will be comfortably nestled in a flogiston chair.
Designed according to "neutral posture" experiments that were conducted to determine the human body's natural alignment, the flogiston chair is intended to give the user a sense of weightlessness. Park, who has designed parts for the space shuttle, created the elegant piece of furniture using a one-piece aluminum frame covered with "long-memory" foam and sheathed in a leather casing.
In everyone's favorite VR movie (mainly because it's just about the only VR movie), The Lawnmower Man, a flogiston made its cinematic debut as the chair in the scientist's basement laboratory. Currently, new models of the chair are being fitted with a base which will give the chair the ability to achieve motion platform effects such as those being used in the Back to the Future theme park ride and the new Douglas Trumbull/Luxor attraction in Las Vegas.
Park pictures flocks of chairs, with helmeted riders flying together in VR space. He says the chair will be capable of achieving .5 Gs at 20 hertz, which I'm told makes for a wild ride. Besides acquainting astronauts with flying in zero G , the chair is being used to alleviate labor pains and to create "waving," which Park says will enable the occupant to feel low-frequency music.
Until VR hits the home market, the flogiston chairs are being bought by people who sit in them, relax, and project themselves, sans electronics, into a hopeful future. flogiston corporation: +1 (512) 894 0562, 71324.3663@compuserve.com.
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Meat Seat
