This paper presents IITP-VDLand, a comprehensive dataset of Decentraland parcels sourced from diverse platforms. Unlike existing datasets which have limited attributes and records, IITP-VDLand offers a rich array of attributes, encompassing parcel characteristics, trading history, past activities, transactions, and social media interactions. Alongside, we introduce a key attribute in the dataset, namely Rarity score, which measures the uniqueness of each parcel within the virtual world. Addressing the significant challenge posed by the dispersed nature of this data across various sources, we employ a systematic approach, utilizing both available APIs and custom scripts, to gather it. Subsequently, we meticulously curate and organize the information into four distinct segments: (1) Characteristics Data-Fragment, (2) OpenSea Trading History Data-Fragment, (3) Ethereum Activity Transactions Data-Fragment, and (4) Social Media Data-Fragment. We envisage that this dataset would serve as a robust resource for training machine- and deep-learning models specifically designed to address real-world challenges within the domain of Decentraland parcels. The performance benchmarking of more than 20 state-of-the-art price prediction models on our dataset yields promising results, achieving a maximum R2 score of 0.8251 and an accuracy of 74.23% in case of Extra Trees Regressor and Classifier. The key findings reveal that the ensemble models performs better than both deep learning and linear models for our dataset. We observe a significant impact of coordinates, geographical proximity, rarity score, and few other economic indicators on the prediction of parcel prices.

Real estate in the metaverse – land or structures in a virtual environment – is, in reality, nothing more than pixels on a computer screen, but its value is rising. Virtual land can be built upon to create experiences that lend themselves to advertising, marketing, socialising and entertainment. The type of properties that are being built in this virtual environment includes corporate headquarters, billboards and casinos where games can be played online by 3D avatars. The value of each plot of land depends on the experience it provides, as well as other factors, such as collectability, platform popularity and market sentiment. When Facebook announced that it would be changing its name to Meta in June 2022, signalling its interest in the metaverse, digital real estate value increased, and it's estimated to increase further by 31% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2022 to 2028, according to recent market data from MetaMetrics Solutions.

It's not a coincidence that two global multinational investment banks and financial services companies, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, agrees that the nascent metaverse market could be worth $8 trillion in the future. In its latest Technology Vision 2022 report, titled Meet me in the metaverse, multinational information technology services company, Accenture surveyed more than 4,600 business and technology leaders across 23 industries in 35 countries. Like an arms race, futuristic big tech companies Microsoft, Facebook (FB now Meta), and Apple Inc, Google (now Alphabet) amongst others, are scrambling to sweep up the metaverse. Facebook (now Meta) describes the metaverse as "a set of virtual spaces where you can create and explore with other people who aren't in the same physical space as you". CEO Mark Zuckerberg says Meta is working on egocentric data, which involves seeing worlds from a first-person perspective.

Imagine you live in a time before the internet. When we all had to work in offices, go to shops to buy things, when TV couldn't be streamed on demand and when most monetary transactions were made using notes and coins. Now imagine someone coming up to you and telling you how something that didn't even exist was going to make all those things seem like ancient history. You'd have found the idea fantastical, laughable even – exactly the way you might feel about the metaverse and the fact that there's a real estate boom going on there right now. Prices have risen by as much as 500% since Facebook changed the name of its holding company to Meta in October 2021, with people paying millions of dollars to buy plots of pixellated land in this virtual world, even though it doesn't fully exist yet.

You might not know this, but the metaverse is coming. Where you can live a life that expands on reality and can approach hyperrealism. I just took my next big step toward embracing it – and soon you may, too. Within a matter of minutes, I was reborn as a holographic avatar – a digital version of me – with the help of the Avatar Dimension technicians in northern Virginia, just west of the nation's capital. My virtual doppelgänger is ready to embark on digital adventures, be inserted into a video game, a movie, or virtual reality. And it's ready for the metaverse, the persistent alternate reality in cyberspace author Neal Stephenson envisioned in his 1992 science fiction novel "Snow Crash."

You might not know this, but the metaverse is coming. Where you can live a life that expands on reality and can approach hyperrealism. I just took my next big step toward embracing it – and soon you may, too. Within a matter of minutes, I was reborn as a holographic avatar – a digital version of me – with the help of the Avatar Dimension technicians in northern Virginia, just west of the nation's capital. My virtual doppelgänger is ready to embark on digital adventures, be inserted into a video game, a movie or virtual reality. And it's ready for the metaverse, the persistent alternate reality in cyberspace author Neal Stephenson envisioned in his 1992 science fiction novel "Snow Crash."