Dutch augmented reality startup Layar has launched a store for special layers of information and graphics that you can superimpose on the world around you through your cell phone. Augmented reality is a nascent technology that can make the real world resemble Terminator vision. (Imagine holding up your camera viewfinder and seeing content tags pointing out places to go.)

Publishers can create and sell special augmented reality layers that tag places with information like real estate listings or restaurants.

The store already has a few products. Travel-guide publisher Berlitz has an augmented reality layer pointing out hotels and places to shop, while EyeTour is selling an augmented reality layer for tourists in Puerto Rico. iPhone app E-Ticket is offering a similar layer for Disneyland and Disney World.

Layar will handle payment processing in multiple currencies and markets for both iPhones and Android devices. Right now, it’s using PayPal to support the U.S., U.K., Canadian and Australian markets.

Layar splits the proceeds with publishers 60-40. The company says the 40 percent it takes covers the legal, administrative and banking costs of running the store.

Certain consumer services have been around for many years, and yet manage to evolve with the times and stay current.

 

The Yellow Pages is one such service. When it began almost 50 years ago, it was a book that consumers could use to find local businesses. As the internet boom took off, Yell.com became popular, and as mobile internet grew, an iPhone app was launched.

 

And now Yell has upgraded their iPhone application to include Augmented Reality, providing the most up to date way for people to find their local businesses.

 

One of Yell’s major assets is a great database of local businesses, their address, phone number, and often additional information about their products, services, etc.

This new iPhone app uses Augmented Reality to provide a simpler, more intuitive way to filter and access that information: you filter by where you are, and you access it in a graphical, real-life way.

It uses a combination of the iPhone’s GPS and compass, which together can pinpoint exactly where you are and can tell which way you’re facing. (For more information about Augmented Reality, see the box below)

The app is extremely easy to use, which is one of its strong points - it is always too bad when an interesting new technology is presented in such a complicated way that it cancels the consumer benefit.

After downloading the app and launching it, you immediately see the world around you displayed on the screen. The app overlays small yellow boxes wherever it can identify a business, and it displays relevant information about that business such as phone number, distance away, opening hour, or website address.

Three additional features make this even more useful:

Radar
Shown at the top of the screen, this gives you a 360° view of all the businesses that are around you, and some idea which are closest.

 

This image also shows the information about presented about the Dolce Vita restaurant,

 

Range
Swish your finger to the left and a scale appears that lets you set the distance that you want the app to “see”. This helps you reduce the amount of information on the screen if there are too many businesses identified.

 

The range can be set from 50 meters up to 5 kilometers.

 

Categories Bar
If you swish your finger to the right, a display bar appears with icons for popular search categories such as Restaurant, Pub, Supermarket, Hotel, etc.

 

Touching one of these buttons lets you select which businesses should be displayed, thus allowing you to get to the information you want more quickly.

 

 

If you’d like to see this new mobile Yell.com with AR in action, take a look at the video below.

 

 

 

Matthew Bottomley, director of new media product marketing at Yell, said: “This is an exciting new way to advertise local businesses. It means any business can be found easily, even if it’s tucked away around a corner or in the next street. So as people get used to using this kind of technology, having a prime ‘high street’ location could well become a lot less important.”

 

Augmented Reality:

For more information about Augmented Reality, take a look at the following MobiAD articles:

• Mobile Augmented Reality Builds Deep Consumer Engagement

• IKEA Uses Mobile Augmented Reality To Engage Shoppers’ Imagination

• Mobile Apps Score At Wimbledon: IBM Uses Location, Twitter, And Augmented Reality To Create Amazing Fan Experience

For most of the first decade of the new century, we all talked about the emergence of location-based services. These services, leveraging GPS chips, were going to revolutionize the world. I remember hearing numerous pitches that envisioned Starbucks offering coupons when you walked by the store. But the future, it seemed, was taking its own sweet time, with the LBS dream constantly being deferred. Fast-forward to today — thanks to new services such as Geodelic, Where and FourSquare, we’re beginning to see that mythical future become an actuality. (Related: our posts on Geodelic, Where)

If 2009 was the year when “geo” became a buzzword and gathered momentum, then 2010 is going to be the year when location-based functionality is going to become commonplace — from mobile apps to consumer devices, even to web services are all going to be geo-enabled. Like me, one man who has been patiently waiting for the future to arrive is Ted Morgan, chief executive of Skyhook Wireless, a Boston-based company that provides location-based service as an infrastructure. His company keeps close tabs on the location ecosystem. (Related: “The Dawning Age of Social Navigation“)

Last week when we were chatting about the industry, Morgan pointed out that he was “surprised how many people were talking about location.” That’s a polite way to say that location finally got buzzy. Or maybe that’s how it seems to me, given that I have been writing about location for nearly a decade. Morgan pointed out that slowly and surely, location has “become part of the mobile nervous system.” (Related: “State of Location Apps“)

Agreed! I think that’s why I’m confounded by some of the offerings of startups that have cropped up. Ask any of the mobile industry insiders and they all say that enhanced location and location-related APIs will become core offerings of major platforms — be it iPhone, Android, BlackBerry or the web. Twitter’s decision to buy Mixer Labs, parent company of GeoAPI, is one such example. (Related: “Who Will Foster the Great Location API?)

Today we “check in” to places, but soon it will become part of the platform, and when that happens we’ll shift focus to applications and services that build upon the concept of checking in. Imagine using the Flixster app in a movie theater, which automatically checks you in when you watch “Avatar” at the IMAX Theater in San Francisco and then offers a 140-character review. Or an UrbanSpoon app that automatically checks you in at the greasy spoon of your choice.

As Morgan explained — we’re going through a phase in the mobile ecosystem where folks are getting excited about location-specific applications. Eventually, all apps will have location-based functionality built in. For now, it seems all the industry is abuzz about apps such as RedLaser, Foursquare and SCVNGR. Investors are happily investing millions of dollars into location-based services such as Gowalla, Outside.in and Hot Potato. (Related: “Why I Love Foursquare” and “Hot Potato Turns Events Into Social Streams“)

More on Mobile Apps

• Smaller Startups to Fuel M&A Fire in Mobile Ads This Year Tech Insider
• Android This Week: Is the Bloom Already Off the Nexus One Rose? Tech Insider
• In the First Week, Google May Have Sold 20,000 Nexus One Phones Tech Insider
• Android: The Wild West of the Smartphone Space? Tech Insider

Morgan, who in the past has been pretty prescient about location-based services, believes 2010 will see the emergence of two major trends that are going to gain traction in years to come:

• Location-based ads will become mainstream as advertising and the mobile web become location-aware.
• Brands will start to use location-based apps to drive sales and marketing efforts.

These two topics were hotly discussed at our Mobilize 09 conference in September. We’ll be keeping you posted about location-related developments as the year unfolds. Both Liz and I are ramping up our coverage of location and mobile apps. If you want to chat with us, drop either one of us an email: om + tips at gigaom dot com or liz + tips at gigaom dot com.

Paris Aerial View: Photo Courtesy of Naserversiontwo via Flickr.

Related from GigaOM Pro:

Free company profiles/analysis: Apple, Google, HTC, Nokia For GigaOM Pro subscribers: “Surveying the Mobile App Landscape” (Subscribe to GigaOM Pro for $79 a year.)

With 197 million augmented reality-capable smartphones set to be in the global market by 2012, up from nearly 91 million in 2010, the building blocks are falling into place for people to merge digital information with their view of the physical world. But while we’re just getting to the point that normal users can see the promise of augmented reality for themselves, there’s still a long way to go.

Right now AR is a big load of hype (and why not? it’s super cool), but the market will supposedly be worth anywhere from $350 million to $732 million by 2014, according to projections by ABI Research and Juniper Research, respectively. How do we get there? GigaOM Pro (subscription required) this week has a great report by John du Pre Gauntt on the technical and business challenges and opportunities ahead for consumer AR apps. They include:

Pinpointing Geo: Today’s AR apps depend mostly on location information, but location data is only accurate to 10-20 meters. The most pressing priority, says du Pre Gauntt, is to make geolocation data more granular and optimized. And mobile social networking apps could actually help us get to a mapped globe quicker, writes du Pre Gauntt. “Foursquare and Gowalla have the potential to be foot soldiers for geotagging the world.”

Opening Eyes: The next area of development will be image recognition, something Google is working on with Google Goggles and Nokia with Point and Find. These early systems are often out of their element unless they can depend on scanning formal markers like barcodes. But a barcode experience tends to take the user out of the lens of AR to bring them to a web site or another resource.

The Apple Roadblock: Though AR developers have begged for access, Apple has a lock on the iPhone’s video feed API. As du Pre Gauntt puts it, “Without a public API to access live video in real time from the iPhone’s camera, it is impossible to do effective image analysis of the object in front.” This barrier could foretell an Apple push to innovate image recognition on its own, or it could mean that more open platforms (aka every other smartphone) are able to harness developer enthusiasm to get ahead.

Teaming Up: The hybrid nature of AR means it’s ripe for cooperation. Diving into today’s major AR app categories of navigation, location overlays, geo-information services, and gaming, du Pre Gauntt finds companies like Mobilizy and Lonely Planet, and Layar and Zehnder collaborating on some very cool travel and event apps. But cooperation seems to only make things more complicated; the implementations require both an AR browser and an app or a separately purchased guide.

The whole idea of using your mobile phone’s camera view as a screen on top of which to add geo-specific information (also known as augmented reality) is one of the more exciting areas in the world of mobile apps. Amsterdam-based Layar, one of the companies at pushing the boundaries of this growing movement, just released Layar 3.0, which offers a whole slew of new ways to layer data onto the real world as seen through your phone.

The company opened up its augmented reality browser to developers last summer and more recently added 3D capabilities. In a blog post, the company details how developers are using its augmented reality platform.

One developer created a 3D architectural model of a building in Rotterdam so that visitors to the construction site can see how a superimposed version of it will look on their phones (see video below).

Another one added cut-outs of the Beatles on Abbey Road and other places they sing about. You could do the same with historical tours, adding historical figures and information about events as augmented reality notes which pop up or let you play an audio narration when you are actually there.

Or you could just add Blimps and UFOs over buildings as sort of an augmented reality graffiti.

And of course there is also a Twitter app which shows nearby Tweets, along with the avatars of the people who Tweeted them (at least I think that’s what it shows).

Anyway, it just shows how many different directions developers can take augmented reality apps. Layar wants to attract as many developers as possible as it seeks funding beyond the $1 million it’s raised so far. Here’s the video:

CrunchBase Information

Layar

iPhone 3G

Information provided by CrunchBase

loving augmented reality features

als ich die ersten augmented reality darstellungen live beim freiheit.com jubiläum gesehen habe war ich begeistert, dass es so schnell schon Anwednungen geben würde habe ich nicht gedacht