Realius

If you care about “place” like we do at Realius, then you’ll love what is happening at the Where 2.0 conference. If you are tired of looking at rooftops on your satellite map, try the new Street View inside Google maps. Street View is brought you by the guys at Immersive Media. The coverage is limited, but you can see where it is going. With Street View, the neighborhood from the street level is just a click away.

Between all the maps, data, and 3D images, the one service that was simple and useful for the consumer is the integration of natural sound tracks into Google Maps or Google Earth. Referred to as the Wild Soundscape Project, My Sanctuary, has assembled:

… over 3,500 hours of wild soundscapes and nearly 15,000 species. The mission: To help connect people to the wild by preserving, presenting, and protecting the voice of the natural world.

The most moving Soundscape is a pair of recordings from Northern California. The recording compares the sounds of the landscape before and after selective logging. The images of the forest have not changed, but the soundscape tells the whole story.

If you want all the news from the Where 2.0 show, check out the O’Reilly Blog.

Welcome to the Realius blog. I am Chuck Teller the co-founder and CEO of Realius. Realius is producing a series of reality-based real estate games, which we refer to as Fantasy Real Estate™ games. Over the coming months, we will be launching our games. If you want to be an early player, sign up here.

I have spent a large part of my career thinking about real estate and what makes various cities and towns great places to live. As a real estate economist and urban planner since the early 1980’s (working here, here and here), I had the opportunity to dig deep into the concept of place and emerging real estate markets. Whether we were examining new Transit-Oriented Developments, large-scale New Town developments or urban revitalization projects, we were always looking for what is necessary to make the community viable, livable and memorable.

I have also analyzed the housing market for myself as I entered and moved up through the market. Like over 70% of Americans, I have gone through several stages of what I call the “homeowner life cycle”. It starts with dreaming to buy a house, then finding just the right one, making it everything the owner wants it to be, inside and out, and then often selling it to find the next one. Before I started each stage, I wished I could have played with my ideas to better understand the market before cutting the real check. As a result, we are designing Realius Fantasy Real Estate™ games to follow the homeowner life cycle so that we can have fun with real estate and learn in the process of playing games. The premise is – if you are good at Fantasy Real Estate™, you’ll be good at reality real estate.

So, where did this idea for Fantasy Real Estate™ games come from? A couple of years ago I started playing Fantasy baseball on the invitation of two of my lifelong buddies. One of them, Daniel Katz had been playing fantasy games for a number of years. Daniel has spent more evenings than he wants to admit frittering away time on the computer, while his wife, Maggie, was checking out real estate on the Internet. She would be checking out prices, finding places for friends, and admiring well-designed interiors. Daniel thought that there could and should be a “fantasy” game based on real world real estate information for her. So, starting in the spring of 2006, Daniel and I hatched the idea for what would become Realius.

Over the last several months, Daniel and I assembled a world-class team of application developers, game designers, and real estate experts to work with us to develop Fantasy Real Estate™ games. So, on February 8, 2007, we launched our first game to a small audience of players. Over the past months, we have been honing the game based on the feedback from our players. Here at the Realius Blog, we’ll chronicle how the pieces have all come together, where we look for inspiration, and more.