The virtual boating future is coming, but there aren’t a lot of rules yet for the people building the boats and marinas inside it. Anybody planning to step aboard right now can score some prime waterfront real estate, but also needs to beware of pirates.
That’s the advice from Carolina Milanesi, principal analyst at the Silicon Valley-based consultancy The Heart of Tech, following the news that somebody paid $650,000 for a yacht that exists only in the metaverse, for use at a virtual marina that’s still being built, inside a digital platform so new that nobody can even access it yet.
Yup, it actually happened. That was back in late November.
To understand what this news means—both today and for virtual. In that film, characters put on virtual-reality headsets and enter a digital world called The Oasis, where they become avatars walking around inside a hyper-realistic video game. As avatars, they can do things just like in the real world, such as drive cars, but they can do those things in virtual-only ways, such as driving the DeLorean from while outrunning King Kong. How the digital world is built, and what players can do inside of it, are limited only by imagination.
