The BYTE [1/23]

THE BYTE

Welcome to the BYTE, where we serve up the latest home and tech news from the last week for you to sink your teeth into.

This week we’re taking a BYTE out of who’s buying, new toys from a familiar site, the turning of VR into an art, and the virtual world being brought to the real world. Dig in!

Generally

Buy Buy Buy

Everyone has their fingers crossed that 2017 is a good year for home sales, but for some it is easier said than done. Millennials are hitting bigger hurdles, but Boomers are primed and ready to buy or at least that’s the hope.

What’s Going On?

Millennials are notorious for being late to the game on buying homes and it’s not getting any easier for them. Interest rates are continuing to rise, since October the rate has risen from 3.42 to 4.2 percent. This isn’t making it easier to get them to buy homes, but there are positive signs in Sioux Falls, SD, Elk Grove, CA, and Bakersfield, CA. Boomers on the other hand are getting a lot of attention from builders because of their access to money, and willingness to move, mainly to be closer to loved ones.

App-solutely

Realtor.com Steps It Up

Realtor.com rolled out some new features for its mobile app to help home buyers find out information as quickly as possible. Sign Snap is one of the new features which allows people to just point their phone at a For Sale sign and it will pull up all the details on the home such as images, price, contact info, and more. The second feature is rolling out for the app soon, Street Peek, expected this spring. Street Peek allows you to take a photo of a home, regardless of if it is for sale or not, and give you any info their database has on the property.

Take Notes

Getting Creative

The latest Google innovation comes to the virtual world, Tilt Brush Toolkit. With this new toolkit you can paint and create things in the virtual world, but now you can animate and have the objects move and interact with each other, with music or really anything. This is one of the first times that animating and having moving objects is doable, instead of just the static images people have been making in the past.

I See, I See

HoloLamp is trying to get rid of the extra gear needed to experience virtual reality. They are working on being able to project 3D images right before your eyes without any eye wear necessary. It looks quite cool, but is still in its easy stages of production.

Totally Unrelated

It’s All Connected

Pixar/Disney has just revealed how all of their movies are linked.