![]() ![]() ![]() “This is not something the law has dealt with before, and it's even hard to find a particularly close analogy.” “I don't know that there is an answer,” Lemley said. Lemley and UCLA Law School professor Eugene Volokh authoredĪ paper about legal aspects of AR and VR in 2017, and I was hoping that he would be able to tell me whether Upland selling a virtual representation of my property was legal. “I share the instinct of your reaction: It seems like there's something wrong with this,” agreed Stanford Law School professor Mark Lemley. Turns out I wasn’t the only one who was weirded out by Upland's virtual land grab. Still, on my block, only three of the two dozen properties are still uninhabited. My East Oakland neighborhood happens to be one with a lot of houses reserved for new players. “That also means we have to balance supply and demand.” “We want to build a stable economy,” Lueth said. Last year, the company auctioned off the land plots tied to the Guggenheim Museum and Rockefeller Center in New York. When Upland expanded to the Bronx in December, all available properties sold out within two hours.The company has responded to this frenzy by reserving some properties for new players, and occasionally auctioning off marquee addresses. These days, new expansions are often met by frantic buying activity. Since then, Upland has regularly opened up new markets like Chicago, New Orleans, Manhattan and Oakland, which is where I call home. At launch, players could only buy around 50,000 properties in San Francisco. Upland tries to keep players engaged by limiting housing supply. If one wanted to buy 5.5 million UPX directly from Upland, the price would be around $5,000. UPX can’t be cashed out directly, but players can opt to sell their properties for U.S. My neighbor’s property is owned by someone who currently holds more than 500 such parcels, and whose net worth is around 5.5 million units of Upland’s UPX in-game currency. This type of gamification appears to be working: The person who bought my property in Upland currently owns about a dozen land parcels, both in the Bay Area and on the East Coast. “Once you complete that collection, your yield on those properties increases.” “Let's say you collect three properties on the same street, or three museums, which are harder to get,” Lueth explained. And there are other in-game incentives to becoming a real estate mogul. Upland players can acquire land plots based on real-world property data the company is licensing from mapping provider Mapbox, and then develop them to generate higher revenues, similar to the way a house or hotel would increase the rent in Monopoly. In December of 2021, Upland crossed 100,000 daily active users. “We launched into open beta in early 2020, and had probably 500 daily active users the first one or two months,” Lueth said. Upland players can acquire plots of land based on real-world property data. These three things combined inspired them to create Upland, according to Lueth. They also had been exploring the potential of NFTs and other blockchain-based technologies. At the time, the trio was binging Netflix’s “Stranger Things,” in which the Upside Down exists as an alternative version of the real world. Lueth and co-founders Mani Honigstein and Idan Zuckerman came up with the idea for Upland after a night playing Monopoly in 2018. “So far, we did not have one single case where people say: ‘OK, how can you do that?’” Lueth told me during a recent interview. That’s apparently what everyone else is doing, according to Upland co-founder and co-CEO Dirk Lueth. ![]() Let Upland be Upland, and carry on with my life here onĪctual land. Inspired by Monopoly and ‘Stranger Things’ This brings up a ton of questions: Who should have the rights to an AR layer tied to a physical address? What does it mean that these AR properties are being divided up among early adopters before most people even know they exist? Will we see the same issues that have plagued real world real estate, including gentrification and displacement, replicated in AR?Īnd, on a more personal level: What should I do about my virtual squatter? One day, these efforts could be key to telling your smart glasses which information to display as you look at a famous landmark, or even your neighbor’s home. And the company is not alone: A small but growing number of startups and crypto initiatives have begun selling and renting out AR spaces tied to real-world addresses. ![]() However, Upland has big ambitions, which include eventually expanding into AR, and providing its data via APIs to third-party developers who may one day be able to build their own game and nongame applications with it. ![]()
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