Layar for the iPhone

Today Layar became available for the iPhone.  Previous to this Layar was the only application that made me truly jealous of those that had Android devices.  Described as a “Layar Reality Browser” I think that it is a major step in transferring augmented reality from a toy into a useful tool.  Utilizing GPS and compass it overlays information on top of reality, allowing you to point your phone in a direction and get different types of information depending on the layer selected.

Previous to today the augmented reality applications available in the App Store for the iPhone were pretty simplistic.  These applications also followed the typical pattern within the App Store of provide as few features as you possibly can for 99 cents and hope that you can sell multiple very similar applications.  This was accomplished in augmented reality by providing access to only one dataset usually.  Most of these applications appear to implement ARkit which is an Open Source Library for Augmented Reality, this video is a fairly good representation of this toolkit.  Nothing against ARkit itself, it is great that someone developed it, it is available and open source.  I think the intent should be for people to expand upon and improve it, not just slap their data in there are sell it for whatever they can get.

Now with Layar available this really changes things, it is smoother than a default ARkit implementation.  It also allows developers to create layers instead of creating simple applications around their data, similar to what can be done with KML in Google Earth.  The data and the application are seperated which allows for greater data sharing.

Instead of being responsible for the entire application developers just have to define what the information looks like and provide a feed to the data.

Layar Service Architecture Diagram

Layar Service Architecture Diagram

According to their site currently 155 layers are available and both Layar and the layers are free.  My first question when I started looking at Layar’s site was “what is the business model, how do they intend to make money?”  According to the FAQs: “We foresee several possible sources of income for Layar. Current sources include: integration fees, licensing fees, sponsoring and hosting/maintenance fees. In the near future there will also be opportunities with premium content layers and advertising.”  I’ll be interested to see how that works, but as far as the pure technology this is a great step forward for AR.

If you don’t have a device that can utilize Layar I suggest you get one, otherwise here is a glimpse of what it is capable.


Layar Demonstration Video

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maploser has content marketing with Arkayne Socialize.

October 14, 2009  Tags: , ,   Posted in: augmented reality

One Response

  1. Justin C. Houk - October 15, 2009

    Great breakdown Kate. Your paragraph on the business model struck up some interest for me. When I think of the biggest pot of money out there I come up with local advertising. I think thats the currently untapped goldmine. Twitter, Google, foursquare, and Bing all are trying to break into that space because it’s an untapped market. Layar either hast to create a brand that they can then sell to those services or tap into them. It’s hard to see how they could do it alone.

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