Electric Sheep built Second Life's New Media campus. (Courtesy of Electric Sheep)

Fully navigable online worlds are flourishing, and all that virtual real estate needs to be furnished. Fantasy worlds such as Linden Labs' Second Life and even reality-based environments such as Google Earth are built to accommodate user-generated houses and other objects, which anyone can design using in-game tools or Google's SketchUp 3-D modeling software. But if you want a modernist masterpiece on your plot of virtual land, you don't have to build it yourself. Several companies and hundreds of individuals have gone into business as virtual contractors, designing items and structures that they can sell for real-world cash.

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