Sometimes it’s awesome to live in the future — or at least pretend to. It’s a place where cars drive themselves, robots traverse the surface of Mars and our military is full of cyborgs. Now, thanks to a team of Japanese researchers from the Ikei Laboratory at the Tokyo Metropolitan University Graduate School of System Design, we can add mind-bending virtual reality to that list.

The new technology was recently unveiled to oohs and ahhs from the crowd at a Tokyo electronics expo. It’s kind of like a video game only completely immersive. With the help of a suit that looks like a cross between an Formula One racecar driver and a baseball catcher, the “player,” so to speak, uses all five senses to take journeys through digital adventures. The idea is to let the player smell the grass, feel the sun, taste the wind, touch the ground and, of course, see everything. They’re calling it “virtual body technology.”

The machine that makes this all possible isn’t necessarily a huge breakthrough in new technology, but rather a novel combination of existing tech. Basically, you sit in a moveable chair and put on a virtual reality helmet that’s equipped with fans and scents. Once you fire the thing up, the chair will vibrate on cue, pedals under your feet will mimic the motion of walking and running and, apparently, you’ll have a ton of fun.

“The chair will move to provide directional and vestibular sensations,” said Professor Yasushi Ikei, who helped develop the technology. “The legs will move to create a sense of actually walking or running and a sense of moving in parallel or up and down, or to create a sensation as if the feet are touching the ground. Extremely large vibrations are felt when you are running, so it is possible to create vibrations from the shins to the knees. When you walk in the city there are various scents and breezes, and these are also recreated.”

Sound like fun? It’s supposed to, however the researchers also had the handicapped and elderly in mind when they designed the machine. The virtual reality experience is so realistic that they say it can mimic real-life travel experiences for those who aren’t very mobile but always wanted to see the Eiffel Tower or Great Wall of China or whatever. Let’s get real, though. There’s only so much a wind machine and a vibrating chair can do. For virtual reality to really work, scientists will probably have to start tapping into the brain itself. Or maybe, just maybe, they already have…