Layar is one mobile application that has definitely managed to get quite some tongues rolling and keyboards rattling this past week, including at the Mobile 2.0 Europe conference in Spain where I just got back from (video demo below).
Layar is a so-called ‘augmented reality browser’, an application that turns you mobile phone’s camera viewer – only on Android-powered phones for the time being – into a full-fledged information portal and local business search engine. It essentially puts an information overlay on top of your camera view, bringing digital data of various sorts into play whenever you’re looking at or for something in the real world.
Imagine being on the look-out for a great new place in a street nearby your current apartment or house and seeing all the real estate listings, with some details and pricing included right from your mobile device as you’re walking down the street. Imagine watching status updates your friends pushed to social networks roll in with location information attached to them (e.g. ‘Tweets Nearby’). Imagine finding information on ATMs, public transport etc. in a city you’re visiting just by starting up the camera on your mobile phone. And thanks to an integration with Google Local Search, how about being able to look up contact information and reviews for businesses (e.g. restaurants, bars, etc.) in your direct neighborhood with one-click dialing capability?
These are all things that are or will be possible with Layar, and there are so many use cases I could think of in under a minute that you’d really have to make an effort to miss the enormous potential of this application.
Layar is typically one of those cutting-edge things that aggressively shoves you nose-first into the enormous potential of the next-generation smartphones and platforms, giving you an idea of what you can expect from inventive developers and service providers thankfully making use of their ever-increasing capabilities in the near future. I can only hope for Layar that they’re not entering the game too early.
Check out this Engadget video for more hands-on coverage. And in case you were wondering, you can expect a Layar application for the iPhone 3G S this Autumn (and not Springtime, duh).
Update: also check out the Sekai Camera app from Japanese startup Tonchidot, which was first unveiled at the TechCrunch50 conference.
Was lucky enough to be an early tester, and I gotta say this thing is wild. So awesome!
You lucky bastard!
Wasn’t Wikitude doing exactly the same more than a year ago ? What is different here ?
@eschnou
The difference is that we enable contentpartners to create their own layer. The real-estate layer is of the biggest dutch real-estate agent Funda in the Netherlands..
Layers are the equivalent of webpages in traditional browser.. So technology is the same(compass, gps) but our positioning/role/purpose is different. We provide easy layer searching, browsing, switching, bookmarking etc.. Same functionalities a normal browser has..
Hope this gives you some clarification..
Cheers!
Are you planning on completing the browser analogy and having a decentralized system so that people can publish their own layars just as they publish webpages, and then users of the Layar browser can load them via a url?
We are looking in to all kinds of scenario’s how to scale and keep offering a quality experience..
Great ! Thanks for the clarification. It is indeed impressive. The wimbledon example below is, for me, the best illustration of how the service differentiate from something like wikitude.
Good job, great to see this coming from Europe !
Or you could go to the Wimbledon tennis tournament and use one on your G1 now if you like:
http://news.bbc...ogy/8107460.stm
Looks like it pips Layar to it – with a nice limited scope of course.
As a 3GS owner, I can’t wait for these to become commonplace, with Google info integrated…
From the above:
“But it’s the “Seer Android Beta” designed for G1 Android mobiles of which the technologists are most proud. Alan Flack describes it as “the app that can read your environment”.
The idea is that G1 users who attend the tournament will be able to get extra information in text form on their handset about everything that is closest to them – such as where the nearest loos are and how long the queue is for strawberries.
It uses the phone’s inbuilt GPS and digital compass to figure out exactly where the phone user is standing and where the handset camera is pointing. It then takes a video feed from the camera and superimposes the extra info on top of it.
IBM admits that it’s not exactly mainstream – G1 hasn’t quite cornered the market like some of its mass-market rivals. But it’s certainly a novelty that will catch the eye of the more gadget-loving end of the tennis crowd.”
This looks cool!
Layar in Bahasa Malaysia means sail.
Can mean “Screen” too in Bahasa Malaysia.
impressive. this definitely puts the user in a more engaged form. can’t wait to see where this leads.
Any word on when this is going to be launched in the US for Android?
This will all be obsolete, because you can bet your 1000% that Google TM is rolling server side ping backs into Android.
This is the same exact technology as voice search.
Instead of compressing an MP3 and sending it to the server for speech to text on search, it’s sending compressed video frames to the server for tag matching.
Remember that only the first frame has to have all the information, subsequent frames only have the differences, so it really isn’t that much data to send to the server on the fly.
Google is now exposing a massive database of information that they have collated with street view, and soon that data will be available as a video overlay you can bet.
The problem with all this tech is that without a patent, it is useless, and this tech has already been patented in the United States to various degrees.
@Dustin
We are in talks with contentparties to create a US version.. No date yet.. but give us a month or two..
The red light district will never be the same…
@Steven
Sorry to disappoint you but no sex layers (soon)..
I can see online games using layar….
I can see online advertisements overlaid with locations.
You see a blank wall in real life, via the phone cam, it’s a huge AD wall.
I see a LOT of things including ADs with higher “CPC” appearing larger or first in the layar screen.
http://www.jomarhilario.com
You folks in Amsterdam have professional love makers legalized over there. Then there are the cafes.
In all seriousness, though, it would be a pretty cool tool for tourists. When you’re hungry, have a list of nearby restaurants with their dishes listed (priority placement for ad revenue), or hotels with vacancy listings auto linked, possibly, to reviews. Then there are the movies, museums – it would certainly hold the promise of revolutionizing the tourist experience. If the user could customize it with interests, budgets, etc., I can imagine it would become very popular when people started using it – provided it’s easy to use and easy to access. Just opening it up to a few licensed users would likely make it a dud.
Does it really matter if it’s legal or not? Prostitutes are literally crawling every major city on earth, California, not withstanding, nor Las Vegas.
People that actually fly to Amsterdam to smoke pot or get a BJ from an anonymous source are retarded.
I think that needed to be said.
You should also know that pot was legalized in California under proposition 215. You can have as little as a stomach cramp as a reason to get a prescription for it here.
This tech has a shelf life because Google has so much more overlay data that they collected from street view. The same thing that happened to Loopt when Google latitude came out.
Chris – why don’t you write Google and tell them that MS and Yahoo are too big and powerful to overcome? Write to Facebook and tell them that they’ll be copied and beaten by Google and MS… or maybe write MS and tell them they’ll never overcome IBM.
The fact is that if these guys do it right, there’s no reason why they can’t the defacto standard to which the others struggle to compete with.
“Trying is the first step toward failure.”
- Homer Simpson
Well, there is plenty of potential for good startups, but you have to pick the low hanging fruit, and shoving yourself between Google and it’s mobile business plan is not one of them.
Low hanging fruit == score
The obvious extension to this technology – as hardware improves – is to have a sort of heads up display first in glasses then even contact lenses. In a sense, this would enable people to constantly layer virtual reality onto real life. Facebook integration would ensure you’d never forget anyone’s name; yelp integration would give you heads-up feedback on all local businesses wherever you are. Kurzweil is right, computers and people will only grow closer as time progresses… the singularity is near.
surprised you didn’t mention the pioneer, Tonchidot Sekai Cam, in your article which demo’d at TechCrunch50
I was thinking the same thing
can you please elaborate as to what you mean by shelf life and loopt vs latitude.
Startups such as Loopt, and other techs that exploit LBS have a certain length of time before they must reach critical mass. If they do not reach critical mass in 1 or 2 years, they are doomed.
Loopt saw some exponential growth, but since Latitude was released their growth has flattened. They are still growing, but not at a rate that will make Loopt a large website on the internet.
If your business plan is to grow slowly and pick up steam over years, then that is another issue. Such is not the case with social media. Slow growth and organic businesses are generally subscription and revenue based.
The web 2.0 boom was funded under the presence of explosive growth.
Correction,
The web 2.0 boom was funded under the pretense of explosive growth. LOL. Darn typos.
I’ll also throw you a bone. Who ever ignores Internet Explorer and builds on the new features of HTML5, such as creating a DOM based video sharing application, or a DOM based 3D game that simply loads in your browser with no plugin will be the next winner in the internet lottery.
That’s coming to both mobile and desktop synchronously, and the big $$$ have all their money on that number at the roulette table.
As cool as it looks, I don’t think it brings so much more than a list of POI on a nice, oriented 2D map. It really has to run fast and smoothly to make a real difference… and the GPS has to be hyper precise.
Anyway, the quality of the content matters much more that the way it is displayed ^^
With face recognition and this technology, this becomes a full fledge life or reality browser type deal.
Soon, EVERYONE can be a TERMINATOR!!
I’ll be back.
This is ultimately Google’s space right?
They already have the outdoor street mapping done, the layers can be added thru any browser – so using gps, compass, and 3d matching and pass down the layers to the device.
Awesome technology. Layar can definitely help businesses make money. http://bit.ly/WR3SE
Nice app, but nothing new dudes.
Layar is not the first Augmented Reality Browser in the World.
Nokia Point & Find Beta was announced October 2008, and at least 3 more initiatives were already mentioned by others to me, so that makes Layer what, 5th at best?
Here you go:
http://www.yout...h?v=M1wM6nlcALA
Nuff said.
We don’t say that we`re the first AR application. We are the first AR browser..
Layar is an enabler. We enable our content partners to offer (branded) Augmented Reality experiences. It’s our role to offer an easy interface to discover and use these Augmented Reality layers. In this we are unique and differentiate us from other AR apps.
Layers are the equivalent of webpages in a normal browser.
See the difference?
Blah, application, browser, what’s the difference? Isn’t a browser an application after all?
It looks to me you’re just putting some syntactic sugar as a lame pretext to justify being “the first”, on something you’re clearly not.
So when I point it at a girl, will it crawl her Google social graph?
I think that’s coming very soon now. Are we ready for that level of information accessibility?
The extended feature of Camera looks will appeal both beginners and advanced photographers.
awesome! ..this is looks cool.
Wow. Am I the only one to mention Vernor Vinge’s “Rainbows End”?
The opportunities and advances made possible by Layar and similar companies will be The Next Big Thing.
The levels of control and variety each represent a “sellable” level of real estate or information. Say I pay $50/month for Most Access. (All Access being $100/month.) And with that, I am able to “see” offers and options that others do not. And I’ll be able to move on them before others via code or password.
The $25/month sucker can only “see” so much while the $100/month playa can “see” it all.
This provides levels of exclusivity – and that will always be a money-maker.
This is mostly a question of standardization. Will all you smart folks please agree on a way to make this work for all versions/variations of mobile devices? And make that info accessible and manageable through an online platform that integrates into existing social networks and CMSs?
Great. Thanks!
Rainbows End is a huge inspiration for us.. We even thank him in the about section of the app
I get downloaded google chrome from this blog. Thanks for this blog.
GoWeb3D has been issued one of a few licenses to develop on Layar augmented reality browser. Big news for us. We’re looking for our first Layars now! Anyone interested? http://tinyurl.com/myrngg