A few months ago we wrote about Spain’s Frikoño 2011 layer and the awesome 3D models of Star Wars spacecrafts therein.

Now developer David Contreras of Spanish technology group ESIDEA has upped his game, adding animation (and lasers!) to simulate battles between the aforementioned Star Wars spacecrafts.

Choose from nine different battle scenes, including the Millennium Falcon vs. a Star Destroyer, X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter and more. There’s even a reenactment of the Battle of Hoth, for all you AT-AT Walker fans.

Perhaps the best improvement in the new Frikoño 2.0 layer, however, is that you can view it from anywhere in the world. The layer text is in Spanish, but chances are most Star Wars fans will figure out what a “Halcón Milenario” is.

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Many world travelers can probably relate to the following scenario: You get to the airport two hours early (as is generally suggested) for your international flight, but end up spending most of that time sitting at the gate, twiddling your thumbs while waiting for the airplane to arrive (still beats being in line at the security check all that time, but still).

Naturally, your mobile phone gets a workout during this wait, but you can only update Facebook so many times before it loses its luster, and your friends already saw that you checked into gate C-16 and are “Sooooo excited to visit NYC!” 

Thanks to KLM and a group of creative developers and designers, you can now channel that excitement into a simple, fun AR trivia game that’s targeted to your travel destination.

The Ready For Boarding layer was created for KLM (Royal Dutch Airlines), and based out of Amsterdam’s Schiphol International Airport. It keeps live data of Schiphol’s flight schedule, so you can choose the exact flight you’re taking and answer trivia questions about your destination that appear as 3D objects in AR.

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Throughout the summer, we’ve covered some of the highlights of Bruce Sterling’s Layar-sponsored AR design class at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.

As all good things must come to an end, so has this class, but not without some impressive final student projects! You can read all our posts related to the Design Class here.

This final concept was created by students Ed Schofield, James Goodnight, Drew Roberts and Jesse Merrell.

The JuJu concept is for an app that would use the Layar Player to embed the JuJu layer. The app is designed to enhance nightlife in the Los Angeles area by augmenting bars, clubs and other venues with that night’s DJ/band line-up, a live camera view inside and more.

Take a peek at these three videos and see for yourself!

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Now that the jury session is in full effect deciding which of the 15 finalists will get a piece of the $55,000 prize money, we’re taking this “downtime” opportunity to share a few of the Creation Challenge concepts that we thought were great, but came up just shy of the final 15.

These concepts may not have fit the Challenge criteria as well as some others, but we do believe they hold a lot of potential and hope the developers will continue to build and promote these awesome Layar Vision experiences!

Take at look at these three ”Honorable Mention” concepts for the Layar Creation Challenge.

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The Occupy Wall Street protests quickly spread from New York City to the rest of the United States to the rest of the world, and it’s only fitting they should now occupy Augmented Reality, where neither blockades nor pepper spray and baton-wielding police officers can keep you off of Wall Street. 

Layar developer and Manifest.AR founding member Mark Skwarek has made a global call to activists to make themselves seen and heard in AR, which according to the AR Occupy Wall Street blog, is much more difficult to do in “actual” reality.

“Protesters were not given permits to protest at Wall Street forcing them blocks from the New York Stock Exchange [NYSE]. Wall Street was barricaded off. Only part of the sidewalk was accessible to the public and there was a constant heavy police presence. 

arOCCUPYWALLSTREET takes the protest to the heart of the financial district, placing them directly in front of the NYSE. Augmented reality gives protesters the ability to have a truly global affect on world events.”

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