Layar: The Countless Layers of Reality

Imagine yourself walking on Bleecker Street, in the middle of Greenwich Village. It’s 10 am and you need some money for a cup of coffee. You just hold your phone in front of you and it shows you, looking through the eye of the camera, the neaerest ATM. It exactly points to where you have to walk to and it tells you how far it is. Exactly how far it is.

Maybe you need more money, because in the same time, on a different layer, the camera shows you the appartments that are for sale or rent. Touch the one you like and you instantly get all the extra information you need: not only the price of the object, but also the amount of rooms, the name of the real estate broker and if you want, it automatically makes a phonecall so that you can start negotiating the price. You seem to be lucky, so why not immediately look for a nice painting you would want to place in your new living room? A next layer tells you about all the art galleries in the neighbourhood. Again: you can actually see where you have to go to, and check the opening hours before you arrive at a closed door.

It probably makes you happy and want to celebrate. Time for yet another layer: your personal social network knows the bars or restaurants you like so it suggests one nearby that suits you. Again, nicely arranged and visible on your screen. To be absolutely sure, it connects you with Google Local Search for the most recent reviews. All you have to do is walk right to your hotspot. Garcon, champagne!

It is the kind of augmented reality that’s making one’s life a little bit easier – and a lot more fun. The Amsterdam based Layar brings it literally within reach for everyone. Well, if you have an Android-powered phone and live in the Netherlands, that is for now. But New York doesn’t have to wait for long: within a couple of weeks the rollout for the United States is planned, and soon the iPhone will follow the Androids, Layar co-founder Claire Boonstra tells True/Slant.

“But first we have to sort out a little problem with Apple. Up to now they’re not allowing applications that make use of video based images. The reason is that it brings the risk of overloading the network. But that’s not what we do, we don’t stream the images or put them in any other way on the network. We’re pretty sure that Apple will understand and allow us on their iPhone-platforms”, Boonstra says.  To put some extra pressure, she joined a group of augmented reality companies to write a petition to Apple in which they clarify their situation.

After Android and iPhone, more platforms will follow. In fact, any phone with a camera, GPS and a compass can use Layar. It works on location based services that are produced by all kinds of inventive developers. They are already in line to be part of the ride. Just two days ago Layar announced that it would be handing out 50 keys for its just launched API. The number of requests is already far beyond these 50, Boonstra says. “With most of them wanting to develop several layers.”

Boonstra is sure she and her two co-founders are only at the beginning of a great adventure. “You can hardly imagine how many applications would be suitable for Layar. Pictures connected with a location, historical data, encyclopedic information, city quests, games, hotspots, you name it. We expect a lot of creativity from the developers. Our task is to enable all this creativity, we don’t produce the content ourselves.”

Boonstra sees several ways to reach a sustainable business model. “We could create premium layers with special clients, of which we could ask a percentage of the turnover. We could have clients pay to be on top of the table, or ask them a small publication fee. And yet another way would be to develop very special layers for niche usergroups like oilfield maintenance. Plenty of ways to get the money in, but of course first of all we have to get a large userbase.”