Augmented reality on mobile with layar

September 10th, 2009

We like layar: Layar is a free application on your mobile phone which shows what is around you by displaying real time digital information on top of reality through the camera of your mobile phone.

For example here is a little film about layar

You even get Layar man the mini series from Japan

There are an extraordinary range of applications, and if you thought social media and social networking were big, wait until you start to get your head around the phrase, “augmented reality”. Augmentation is merely the layering of information and data over each other to create more value – like a map! And the layar boyz and girlz have done that within a mobile context.

Share this layar

If you’re using Layar to look through your mobile phone’s camera and see real estate listings for the buildings nearby, social network messages left by your friends in a particular place or Flickr photos from the area – you can now share that data set’s layer with anyone else by sending them its URL.

Layar hopes that it will eventually offer thousands of layers to view the world through and this feature will allow users to tell their friends by email, Facebook, Twitter etc. how to “see the world as I see it.”

Share this layar

Businesses in the networked society have to enable people to better do things; connect, share, collaborate, find, discover. INfomation has to be timely, relevant and in deep context. That to me is what makes layar so interesting.

Amazingly there are 87 layers that are now live (or almost) all over the world available in the Layar 2.0 Content Catalog. Which includes

Real estate

Health care

Transportation

Tourism: Places to stay

Tourism / Tours / Guides

Leisure and entertainment

Games

Weather

Retail

University / Schools

Local search & Directory services

Social networks & communities

Are these the green shoots of the semantic converged network? This post combines with True knowledge in the semantic network

The perfect search

But perfect search will require more than ubiquity, clickstreams, and personalisation. The vast corpus of information now available to us is often meaningless unless it is somehow tagged – identified in such a way that search engines can best make sense of it and serve it up to us

And this also reminds of Roku’s reward an augmented mobile reality game.