Layar is a Dutch

Netherlands

The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...

 company based in Amsterdam

Amsterdam

Amsterdam is the largest city and the capital of the Netherlands. The current position of Amsterdam as capital city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands is governed by the constitution of August 24, 1815 and its successors. Amsterdam has a population of 783,364 within city limits, an urban population...

, founded in 2009 by Raimo van der Klein, Claire Boonstra and Maarten Lens-FitzGerald. They have created a mobile browser called Layar. The browser allows users to find various items based upon augmented reality

Augmented reality

Augmented reality is a live, direct or indirect, view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data. It is related to a more general concept called mediated reality, in which a view of reality is...

 technology.

On September 1, 2010, the World Economic Forum

World Economic Forum

The World Economic Forum is a Swiss non-profit foundation, based in Cologny, Geneva, best known for its annual meeting in Davos, a mountain resort in Graubünden, in the eastern Alps region of Switzerland....

 announced the company as a Technology Pioneer for 2011.

Technology

The browser makes use of the following:

• In-built camera
• Compass
• GPS
• Accelerometer

These are used together to identify the user’s location and field of view. From the geographical position, the various forms of data are laid over the camera view like inserting an additional layer.

Content

Data in the browser comes in the form of layers. Layers are REST

Representational State Transfer

Representational state transfer is a style of software architecture for distributed hypermedia systems such as the World Wide Web. The term representational state transfer was introduced and defined in 2000 by Roy Fielding in his doctoral dissertation...

 web services

Web service

A Web service is a method of communication between two electronic devices over the web.The W3C defines a "Web service" as "a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network". It has an interface described in a machine-processable format...

 serving geo-located points of interest

Point of interest

A point of interest, or POI, is a specific point location that someone may find useful or interesting. An example is a point on the Earth representing the location of the Space Needle, or a point on Mars representing the location of the mountain, Olympus Mons.The term is widely used in...

in the vicinity of the user. Layers are developed and maintained by third-parties using a free API; Layar as a company is responsible for their validation in the publication process.

As of July 2010, Layar had 1000 layers.
As of September 2011, Layar had 2993 layers.

External links

• http://www.layar.com/ - Official page
• Dutch Layar signs global augmented reality deals - http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE65H45B20100618?type=technologyNews
• Layar to bring its augmented reality to one-third of global smartphones - http://mobile.venturebeat.com/2010/06/18/layars-augmented-reality-footprint-grows-to-one-third-of-global-smartphones/