What is the significance of the setting in "The Veldt" by Ray Bradbury?

"The Veldt" has two settings: the Happylife Home where the Hadley family lives, and within that, the nursery with its viewscreens that are almost always set to an African veldt. The significance of the Happylife Home is that it does everything for the Hadleys, taking over the role of the parents. The ease and convenience it offers, this $30,000 house which "clothed and fed and rocked them to sleep and played and sang and was good to them" has ruined their family life: the children, Wendy and Peter, have become rude and spoiled and spend all their time in the nursery. Ironically, the Happylife Home brings misery.

The nursery is significant because it represents the amorality of the soulless technology that has taken over parenting the children. In the nursery, the children constantly watch a scene of Veldt, where lions, following the rule of the jungle, devour other, weaker animals. The thirty by forty foot nursery has a "thatched floor." The parents look on uneasily as

here were the lions now, fifteen feet away, so real, so feverishly and startlingly real that you could feel the prickling fur on your hand, and your mouth was stuffed with the dusty upholstery smell of their heated pelts, and the yellow of them was in your eyes like the yellow of an exquisite French tapestry, the yellows of lions and summer grass, and the sound of the matted lion lungs exhaling on the silent noontide, and the smell of meat from the panting, dripping mouths. The lions stood looking at George and Lydia Hadley with terrible green-yellow eyes. 

The parents initially try to brush away the threat the nursery represents, but over and over again the children witness the ruthless killing and feeding of the lions until the parents become alarmed and make plans to shut the nursery down.

In the end, the house, and specifically the nursery, takes over the children's life so wholly that the children kill parents. The house and nursery come to represent technology that is out of control. The family, the story suggests, would have been far better off with a house that did less for them and the children happier and healthier without a nursery.