Long before we set off for a destination, we arrive there digitally. Walking through the avenues of a new city isn’t so much a new discovery as it is a physical confirmation of Google Street View. Restaurants merely instantiate the menus we’ve already perused on the web. The view from the window of the Trans Siberian Excess is an unedited, uninteractive version of the Google Maps tool. You’ve already heard the noise before, too, by selecting ‘rumble of wheels’ from the drop-down menu.

Digital tools have removed much of the unknown from travelling, for good – you can now look up a hotel’s ‘enviable location’ and wonder who on earth would envy it – and for bad: there are fewer nice surprises. But as we scan and rasterise more of the real world, and develop new, powerful technology for representing it, the gap between the digital and physical is getting smaller. When it becomes so small that we no longer notice the difference, will we become virtual travellers? What happens when online isn’t just a brochure we browse before leaving? What if the destination itself is digital?

On 31 August 1962, Morton Heilig, a New York-based lm director, unveiled the Sensorama. Users would sit in front of the arcade booth-style cabinet, placing their heads inside an upper unit to experience widescreen, 3D images and stereo sound – they would even be tilted in the seat. Its killer app was a virtual travel demo: the viewer rode a motorcycle through Brooklyn, with the wind blowing on their face, the seat vibrating with the revving of the engine, and the smells of New York wafting through. “Its purpose is to enable the user to experience all the sensations of sight, hearing, smell and touch in an unfamiliar environment without actually going there,” said the New York Times, while Heilig called it “the Experience Theatre”.