The House You Download To Your Desktop

The housing market is in shambles. Thanks to years of unsavory lending practices, home foreclosures are at record highs across the country, and what was once a safe, reliable investment -- or at least something to "flip" for a quick profit -- has become an outright liability.But from the ashes of this current housing meltdown, a new model for building and designing homes is poised to emerge, one fueled not only by technological innovation and a desire to reduce our footprint on the planet, but ultimately a complete re-imagining of what the home can and should be.

I’ve spent the last 20 years developing software, managing software development, and doing software systems analysis full-time. I’ve been programming since I was 16. The first time I went to college, my major was computer science.  Since then, I’ve seen one major revolution in the computer industry, which essentially blew up everything that came before it.

AMSTERDAM — Hundreds of years after wealthy merchants began building the tall, narrow brick houses that have come to define Amsterdam’s skyline, Dutch architects are updating the process for the 21st century: fabricating pieces of a canal house out of plastic with a giant 3-D printer and slotting them together like oversized Lego blocks. Hedwig Heinsm

It’s possible. Even a guy in the tiny, impoverished African country of Togo has done it. For someone living in a low-tech society like 33-year old Kodjo Afate Gnikou, spending $800 for a desktop printer is a little steep. So Afate constructed his own working printer from junk, mostly spare computer, scanner and inkjet printer parts he found in a local dump. It’s believed to be the world’s first 3-D printer made from e-waste.

Dutch architect Janjaap Ruijssenaars has designed a 12,000-square-foot "house with no beginning or end," and he plans to build the entire thing using only a 3D printer.

A French startup called Prynt recently debuted a $99 smartphone case that includes a built-in printer. The case’s printer connects to your smartphone via Bluetooth, and can print photos in roughly 50 seconds.

You've probably heard of "virtual reality." That's what you get when you put on an Oculus Rift headset and feel like you've entered a completely new world.

Deep Space Industries, a newly formed company, announced plans today, Jan. 22, to launch the world's first fleet of asteroid-hunting spacecraft to search for space rocks that can be harvested for precious metals and other resources.