Last week, Apple unveiled its Vision Pro headset, blending virtual and augmented reality, and the feedback has been mostly favorable. Despite the occasional picture of someone looking ridiculous walking around in them, a majority of users have shared positive feedback on their experience, contributing to a rise in Apple’s stock price due to the favorable reception.
Already there have been announcements that there is a metaverse being developed for Vision Pro, a digital universe where players can interact and even transact with one another. The company developing this metaverse, Victoria VR, has already seen its token prices jump, similar to the speculative gold rush that happened to digital real estate when the first metaverse marketplaces launched in the early 2020s.
When the idea of real estate in the metaverse came out, there was a lot of talk of it being “the next Bitcoin.” In fact, a lot of the people who had made a fortune on crypto were fueling the escalation of prices for digital properties. People were paying large sums for parcels in metaverses like The Sandbox, Otherside, and Decentraland. But the lasting power of most of these virtual worlds has not justified those prices. At its peak in 2022, someone paid $450,000 for a virtual house in The Sandbox next to rapper Snoop Dogg’s digital mansion. Now parcels in the same universe are going for a few hundred dollars.
The real estate industry followed the hype. Brokerages started selling metaverse real estate, and eXp Realty even developed their own metaverse to connect its worldwide network of agents.
A key reason why metaverses haven’t achieved the popularity developers anticipated is that they haven’t become spaces where users wish to spend significant amounts of time. The daily user count across all well-known metaverse platforms remains substantially lower than initial levels during the peak of early excitement. Back in 2022, The Sandbox was reported to have fewer than one thousand active daily users. Additionally, Decentraland’s “Fashion Week” last year attracted over 60 brands to sell their digital clothing, but there were very few buyers interested in purchasing them.
Apple has the potential to turn the tide in the metaverse market. By crafting an engaging digital universe accessible through its headset, Apple could lay the foundation for a metaverse with genuinely valuable real estate. Despite this potential, there are reasons to remain cautious about investing in digital property. As Mark Cuban pointed out, digital real estate might not hold as much value as a URL due to the limitless nature of the space that can be created. But given Apple’s track record of creating some of the most sought-after electronics globally, the digital real estate in its metaverse may possess a more enduring appeal in this next phase.
Insider Insights
🎱 Ominous prediction: Reserve Chair Jerome Powell is predicting that more small banks will likely close or merge due to commercial real estate exposure.
💻 Power to do more work: Dell is the latest tech company to call its workers back to the office at least three days a week.
Overheard
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