About
In a nutshell, Virtual Realty is a mashup of both Microsoft's Virtual Earth and currently Live Expo's housing feed, hence the name.
It was first conceived in Feb. 2007 as a BuddyScript bot (now Windows Live Agent) for the Windows Live training that I
attended in Redmond, Washington.
In the bot form, the searches were done through the chat window, while the results were
shown in the activity window of a MSN chat. The interesting thing about this version is that it used Natural Language
to determine what the user was looking for. The user could type in something like "find apartments in seattle washington",
or "find houses near 90210".
Since I have no where to host a Windows Live Agent, I've decided to transform the bot into a stand alone website, which is what
you see now. No, the site is not done. There are lots of improvements that I will be making.
Currently, due to the limitations of Windows Live Expo, searches are limit to the US only. Rumour has it that Windows Live
Expo is shutting down soon (so if the site doesn't work, this is probably why), so I've found a new feed provider that I will be implementing.
There are still lots of things that I need to do when I get the time. Some of them include:
- Enhancing the interface (popups, results list, overall look and feel).
- Implement the new data feed.
- Move the parsing out of the code behind and into it's own classes.
- Provide advanced searches, such as by the number of bedrooms or the price.
- Add paging.
- Caching feed data.
- Adding transit information. This has already been started for Toronto.