This week, Christie, a retired school teacher in Perth, paid a bit over $1,000 to buy a virtual penthouse in a place called Uphoria, one of the many metaverse worlds that are being launched this year.
"The vision for this penthouse is rather than me hosting Zoom calls, I can send out my link to people to join me there," she said.
"If we're going to do Zoom calls anyway, we might as well do it in style."
Virtual real estate is booming, with sales topping $US500 million ($700 million) last year and predicted to double again in 2022.
Within a few years, the market size of the metaverse could be valued in the trillions, according to investment banks like Morgan Stanley.
But as the hype goes into overdrive, some are warning that virtual land is just another pyramid scheme, driven by baseless speculation, and when it fails many will lose their money.
So what is virtual land, what are the risks for potential buyers, and who's actually buying it?
The Sydney family 'buying plots for our children'
Lisa, who runs a consultancy business in Sydney, and her husband, a federal public servant, have spent a "significant amount" on several plots of virtual land in a metaverse called TCG World.
They've also invested their time, spending up to 10 hours a week volunteering as virtual real estate agents and forum moderators.
"We've bought a number of [large, premium-location] plots and a number of virtual farms," she said.
To understand what Lisa is talking about, we need to rewind a little.
Metaverses like TCG World are designed to be collaborative virtual spaces where users can socialise, play, work, learn, and shop.
Think of them like enormous online multiplayer games, such as Fortnite, except they're not just for shooting each other.
There have been multiple, repeated attempts to build spaces like this over the years, and none have proved that popular.
In the past few years, however, improvements in virtual reality (VR) headsets, the rise of "play-to-earn" games, as well as the relative popularity of cryptocurrencies and NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, have convinced some tech people that the metaverse's time has come.
The metaverse's big bang moment?
Then, in October, Facebook dropped the bombshell that it was rebranding as "Meta" and was now a "metaverse company".
Facebook's involvement lent credibility to the idea and triggered the current boom.
Suddenly, the metaverse was the future of … everything.
"[The metaverse] can fundamentally change the medium through which we socialise with others," one prominent investment strategist wrote at the time.
Another stated: "It has the potential to disrupt almost everything in human life."
Sounds like a big deal, right?
Lisa in Sydney is betting there's something in these predictions and that TCG World will be one of the winners.
One day, she says, she and her husband (and her children, when they're grown up) will be working full-time in the metaverse.
"There's a demand for having a virtual community for people to interact and have business in," she said.
They plan to earn in-game currency through performing play-to-earn activities within the virtual world, such as farming coins or hunting virtual creatures, and have visions of organising virtual dating events, operating transport services, and running a cooking school.
In general, Lisa believes the virtual world will reward the entrepreneurial spirit in a way that the physical world does not.
"In Australia, the cost of real property is quite prohibitive and so is what you can do with real properties," she said.
"When it comes to the metaverse, the possibilities of what you can do with a plot of land are limitless, from cool mansions for friends to hang out with all the way to virtual bars and nightclubs."
"There's fewer limitations in a virtual world, a lower entry price and more opportunity.".
'We've got 5,000 individual landowners'
What's remarkable about Lisa's confidence is that TCG World doesn't exist yet.
From an office in the Netherlands, David Evans is leading a global team that's building the virtual world from scratch.
Born in May 2021, work on TCG World had been proceeding quietly when Facebook changed its name and the metaverse concept was thrust into the news.
"All of a sudden, the hype and the buzz behind it meant that we just grew a lot quicker than we anticipated," Mr Evans said.
In November (a month after the Facebook announcement), Mr Evans put TCG World's first plots of virtual land up for sale.
He's now sold 16,000 plots, at a total value of more than $8 million.
With an average of three plots per buyer, thousands of people have each paid thousands of dollars to stake a claim in a world that's still at least six months away.
"We have about 16 or 17 real estate agents now that are out there selling the virtual land plots," Mr Evans said.
"We've got Telegram groups with 12,000 people that are just hyped up and excited every day and dying to see it."
By metaverse standards, TCG World is small fry.
Decentraland, founded in 2017, has about 300,000 active monthly users.
As the number of participants has multiplied, plots with the most foot traffic have become the most valuable.
Late last year, a virtual real estate firm paid $US2.5 million ($3.5 million) for a plot of land in the heart of Decentraland's fashion precinct.
The precinct will be developed to stage fashion shows where catwalk avatars will model clothes that users can buy to dress their own avatars.
Luxury brands have already signed deals to take part.
The real estate firm's CEO said the purchase was like snapping up a cheap slice of Manhattan in the nineteenth century.
Are many Australians buying virtual land?
Though not widespread, there has been a clear uptick of interest in virtual land in recent months, according to the admin of an Australian Facebook group that shares information on NFTs and the metaverse.
"There's still some people who are resistant and don't quite understand why you'd want that or do that," said Simone, who also goes by the name The CryptoDomme.
Virtual land may seem like a very fringe idea now, Simone says, but it may soon become common, just like cryptocurrencies and NFTs have done.
Now Australian banks are offering crypto-trading to their customers and NFTs are being advertised at the Australian Open.
Simone predicted that virtual land, which is a type of NFT, would become the focus of attention for crypto-investors in 2022, like Cryptopunks and Bored Apes Yacht Club collectables were in 2021.
That's not necessarily a good thing — the NFT art market was a bubble.
"You definitely want to be careful, there are a lot of charlatans out there," she said.
But what if it's a giant flop?
Despite the trillion-dollar predictions, the confident sales pitches, and the relative success of places like Decentraland, no-one knows if truly large numbers of people will want to use the metaverse.
Maybe none of these brand-new virtual worlds will be popular, the hordes of cashed-up users will never arrive, and the penthouses and precincts will end up abandoned and worthless.
Jathan Sadowski, a senior research fellow at the Emerging Technologies Research Lab at Monash University, says the hype looks like a pyramid scheme.
"They look a lot like multi-level marketing schemes in how they operate," he said.
That is, when the investors go elsewhere, someone will be left owning a virtual Eiffel Tower that's worth nothing.
TCG's David Evans acknowledges the metaverse may never become mainstream.
"There's always a risk to every investment," he said.
"If mainstream adoption takes place within the metaverse, then yeah, the crazy numbers that are being projected may be exceeded.
"But if it's not adopted by the mainstream, then it will still be adopted by the crypto community, potentially the gaming community, and it'll grow a little bit slower, but it'll still grow."
Meanwhile, other rival metaverses are winking into existence, with backers hunting for willing investors.
In one of these, you can buy an NFT that makes you "virtual president of Australia".
The token remains unclaimed, along with the tokens for every other country.
