When Suzanne Lane of Coldwell Banker Bain in Washington put a high-end home up for sale for one of her clients not long ago, she quickly attracted the attention of a buyer from Italy. He had walked through the property, even though he never visited Mercer Island, Wash., where the house is located, to do it.
Instead, he visited the house virtually with an "avatar" on the increasingly popular three-dimensional virtual-reality platform called Second Life.
When I last looked into this transaction, the house hadn't sold, and I don't know if the Italian buyer even made an offer. But you can expect to see more business transacted this way in the next few years because all of the technology to make these kinds of transactions commonplace—regardless of the industry you're in—is already in place.
Second Life was launched in 2003 by Linden Lab of San Francisco and received little notice until about three years ago, when the company announced that it...
