By Alexander Lee

This article is part of a 10-piece Digiday series that explores the value of NFTs and blockchain technology.

Some of today’s leading metaverse platforms have made millions of dollars selling virtual land — but they’re still figuring out how to get users to spend time on their digital property.

There are numerous brokers of virtual land, but a group of prominent digital real estate companies has emerged — Decentraland, The Sandbox, Somnium Space and Cryptovoxels— which Web3 observers have dubbed “the Big Four.”

Until now, virtual real estate has largely been treated as a financial asset, but recent trends in the crypto market indicate that this use case might not be sufficient: As crypto markets continue to crash, the average price of virtual land NFTs in both The Sandbox and Decentraland has dropped by thousands of dollars in recent months. To stop the bleed, both metaverse executives and virtual land investors are becoming increasingly aware of the need to add tangible utility to their digital property, either through gamification, community-building or a combination of the two.

Each prominent virtual land platform operates a digital world consisting of a set number of land parcels — for example, Decentraland has 90,000, The Sandbox has a total of 166,464 — with each parcel acting as a non-fungible token (NFT) that can be bought and sold on the open market. At the time of this article’s writing, the floor price for a parcel of Decentraland land is 2.1 ETH, or approximately $3,400; in The Sandbox, it’s 1.88 ETH, or $3,000. Parcels range in price depending on their size and location.

The world of technology is rapidly shifting from flat media viewed in the third person to immersive media experienced in the first person. Recently dubbed “the metaverse,” this major transition in mainstream computing has ignited a new wave of excitement over the core technologies of virtual and augmented reality. But there is a third technology area known as telepresence that is often overlooked but will become an important part of the metaverse.

While virtual reality brings users into simulated worlds, telepresence (also called telerobotics) uses remote robots to bring users to distant places, giving them the ability to look around and perform complex tasks.  This concept goes back to science fiction of the 1940s and a seminal short story by Robert A. Heinlein entitled Waldo.  If we combine that concept with another classic sci-fi tale, Fantastic Voyage (1966), we can imagine tiny robotic vessels that go inside the body and swim around under the control of doctors who diagnose patients from the inside, and even perform surgical tasks.

I know that sounds like pure fiction, but a startup company in Hayward California has recently “flown” a tiny robot inside the digestive track of human subjects. The company is Endiatx, and I had a chance to discuss their technology and vision with CEO Torrey Smith.  As a technologist who has been involved in telepresence research from the early days, I was impressed with the progress Endiatx has made. But before I get into that, let’s jump back in time a few decades and provide some context as to why their breakthrough strikes me as such an unexpected advancement.