Layar Augmented Reality Now World Wide on Android, iPhone is Nex. Layar, the jaw-dropping Dutch Augmented Reality browser we wrote about earlier this summer, announced today that it is now available worldwide on Android handsets. Hundreds of new data layers are available to view on top of your phone's camera viewer, from Wikipedia entries when you're looking at geographic points of interest to Trulia real estate listings that are viewable when you point your phone at homes for sale.
Trulia says it only took about 3 hours to build its layer on the Layar data set, something that's very promising for the future of the platform. The program is now coming preinstalled on the Samsung Galaxy (i7500) in the Netherlands, and the company says the iPhone 3GS will be next. Other developers have reported that they expect the iPhone to offer official support for Augmented Reality apps as soon as next month.
Of all the Augmented Reality apps we've seen so far, though, Layar is the most exciting because it's a platform. Prepare Yourselves: Augmented Reality Hype on the Rise. Augmented reality -- or the addition of a layer to the world before your eyes (aka the "real world") using technology -- is the next big tech trend. Already making its debut in everything from mobile apps to kids toys, "AR" will clearly soon be talked about by everyone the way they used to talk about "social media" and "Web 2.0" before that. While augmented reality has its uses -- although many of them just involve oohing and aahing at nifty apps -- this trend is already in danger of being over-hyped, even though it has barely gotten off the ground.
AR Apps We've Seen So Far We've been fascinated by augmented reality for some time now, especially after we got wind of a new mobile application built for Google's Android platform called Layar. The app, an augmented reality browser, "layers" sets of data on top of your mobile phone's viewfinder as you point the camera at the city around you. AR Discovered by Marketers. Time to Dial Down the Hype? TAT augmented ID. Augmented Reality: Here's Our Wishlist of Apps, What's.
There's another dimension present, everywhere we go, that a growing number of technologists are working to uncover. These people aren't talking about theoretical physics or a magical world of fairies and gnomes - they're talking about information that could offer more context to traditionally physical lived experience. Augmented Reality (AR) is the phrase being used and this practice of making layers of data available on top of real world experiences could be a big one soon. Improvements in geolocation, bandwidth, mobile devices and APIs are the foundation of this feeling that a useful Augmented Reality may be more realistic today than ever before. AR isn't new, but it's been pretty hokey so far.
Now there's a movement to make it really worth doing. It's still such a fanciful prospect that we decided to publish our wish list for Augmented Reality apps we hope someone builds. We also posted some of the most interesting recent AR videos from around the web. Place Data Find My Keys or Car.