Layar’s Augmented Reality Browser: Literally More Than Meets The Eye
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by Robin Wauters on June 21, 2009
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).
