IT is not uncommon for people to buy vacation homes they may only visit a few times a year. What about a home you never visit? And that does not actually exist?

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The market for digital files sold as nonfungible tokens (NFTs), has exploded this year, most notably when an artwork by Beeple sold for US$69.3 million at an online auction held by Christie's in March. But real estate, architecture and design are also booming in the virtual marketplace.

Hrish Lotlikar, co-founder and chief executive officer of SuperWorld, an augmented reality virtual world, said the company had sold "thousands of properties" already in 2021, with users spending, on average, around US$2,000 on the virtual real estate platform.

SuperWorld is geographically mapped onto the real world, divided into 64 billion plots of equal size covering the surface of the earth. So a person could theoretically own virtual land encompassing the Eiffel Tower, the Colosseum in Rome or prime commercial property in Lower Manhattan. Or if you are nostalgically inclined, an NFT of your childhood home.

"Some of those iconic properties people bought right in the beginning," said Mr Lotlikar, who grabbed up nearly 50 virtual properties on his own platform, including one encompassing the Giza pyramids in Egypt, Piccadilly Circus in London and several blocks in Manhattan in and around Times Square.

Unpurchased 100-metre by 100-metre plots on SuperWorld cost 0.1 Ether, or the equivalent of US$250 based on the recent value of the cryptocurrency.

Marcus Fairs, the founder and editor-in-chief of Dezeen, an architecture publication that has covered the world of virtual design sold as NFTs, said many of his readers have pushed back against the trend.

Indeed, is not the most essential function of a house to provide physical shelter? What can you do with a virtual sofa if not sit on it? The practical use case is not unlike Lunar Land, the company that sells land on the moon.

At this early stage, it is hard to know whether virtual real estate and architecture is a curious fad or the future. Mr Fairs, for one, is intrigued by the possibilities.

"I do think the movement behind it is valid," he said. "Clearly, we're moving very quickly now to a state where a virtual world can do everything we can do in the physical world."

If you are scratching your head at people paying real money for virtual property in a simulated world, consider that Mars House, billed as "the first NFT digital house in the world", recently sold for 288 Ether, or US$512,000.

Krista Kim, the Toronto-based artist who designed Mars House, said she created it on an iPad last spring. She had been making what she described as "digital Zen gardens", and Mars House, inspired by the serene and stylish architecture of Kyoto, Japan, was her actual dream home: It was designed specifically for the metaverse, the term for a shared virtual space.

When she listed Mars House for sale on the NFT marketplace SuperRare, she was curious to see whether this digital house would sell for the amount of a real home. She was not surprised when it did.

"I could foresee in the future that we would have digital architecture," Ms Kim said, where with augmented reality glasses, "people would spend times in digital homes, digital spaces".

Mr Lotlikar imagines monetising virtual real estate within the metaverse - say, by leasing billboard space to advertisers or buying and selling properties as you would in the physical world. Ms Kim has been granted permission by the new owner of Mars House to open it for public tours and private events through the virtual reality platform Spatial.

"We are going to host the first metaverse wedding in June in the Mars House," she said.

Source NYTIMES