You can buy an AR overlay of any place on Earth

The Future. Virtual real estate is here, and although the fully-digital metaverse real estate market is already popular, keep your eyes on the AR metaverse market, which overlays a digital world on top of our own. The capabilities are fun… you can outfit real places with whatever your imagination can conjure up. But, expect current owners to fight back against non-consensual digital ownership of their properties — and for future property deeds to include virtual rights on their land.

Part and Parcel
What if you could buy a world on top of our real one — like the Griffith Observatory or your own home? Noah Gaynor, CEO of virtual real estate platform Parcel, pinpoints three that are worth keeping an eye on.

• OVR, which has sold over half a million parcels of land and has seen its token spike 25% this past month.
• Superworld, which allows people to buy virtual landmarks around the world as NFTs.
• Earth2, which allows users to buy a perfect virtual representation of Earth and “build, trade, and interact” on it.

Although Gaynor says 99% of AR metaverse platforms will fail, there’s no denying that some form of AR adoption will surge. There are expected to be 800 million mobile AR users by the end of the year and 1.74 billion by 2024. And when Apple finally releases its AR headset (that will reportedly offload computing power to a person’s iPhone), the sky’s the limit.

Zillow for the metaverse
Parcel understandably puts immense stock in the success of real estate in the metaverse (both AR and VR). Like Zillow, Parcel provides an estimate on how much digital land costs (always fluctuating) across various platforms, including Decentraland and The Sandbox.

And there’s real money in virtual real estate, with investors spending over $100 million in just the past two weeks. Like the NFT boom, it’s mostly speculation at the moment… but so was the California Gold Rush. People will flock to money-making opportunities, and there’s no way that buying a virtual mansion next to Snoop Dog’s in The Sandbox won’t pay off down the road… although, we do admit that $450,000 is a lot for that.