Hot off the newswire:

AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS – September 20th, 2011 - Layar, the largest open platform for mobile augmented reality (AR), today announced they entered into a strategic partnership with Telefonica I+D for providing them with their market leading Visual Search Technology: IRIS. Visual Search enables Layar to search through millions of images to identify these images and correctly augment them on the mobile phone resulting in a more intuitive user experience.

Visual Search is a key component in the delivery of vision based Augmented Reality services to end-users. It makes it possible for real world objects to work as identifiers and/or hyperlinks for augmented reality experiences. Layar is adding IRIS Visual Search capability to their Layar Reality Browser, making it significantly easier for users to discover relevant Augmented Reality content.

The goal of Telefonica’s IRIS project is to develop a service that provides information related to an object just by taking a picture of it. The object needs no special packaging, tag or marker. For this objective, Telefónica I+D has developed and patented proprietary visual recognition technology. This technology enables the identification of objects such as supermarket products, logos, posters, or paintings among others. The collaboration of this project with Layar is framed within the Open Innovation initiative of Telefónica I+D.

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Last Thursday we hosted a Layar Vision Best Practices webinar, where our product and R&D departments provided examples of good vs. bad reference images and answered developer questions.

In case you missed it, you can download the Best Practices webinar here, or access all of our webinars on the wiki.

We’re hosting our next webinar Thursday, October 13 at 5pm Amsterdam time (CEST). This time we’ll be addressing technical questions dealing with all aspects of Layar development, and we’re asking you to submit questions and suggested topics to webinar[at]layar[dot]com a week in advance (by Thursday, 6 October).

Register for the Layar Technical Q&A now!

For many people, Layar is their first foray into an Augmented Reality browser, so we created a video to quickly walk new users through the application (using v5.0.3 for Android).

The goal of this video is to familiarize you with the app interface and browsing options so you can easily find and view all the great AR content on the Layar platform. 

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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 video was made by students Josh Finklea, Nico Sala and Jason Yeh for a concept called See/k. The See/k concept is intended for a store experience and was developed for a high culture fashion label as a means to create interest in the release of a limited edition perfume. Check it out!

See\k from joshua Finklea on Vimeo.

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After the recent release of several new Augmented Reality-capable devices, BlackBerry users can finally download Layar!

Layar now supports the following BlackBerry 7 OS devices: BlackBerry Bold 9900/9930, BlackBerry Torch 9850/9860 and BlackBerry Torch 9800/9810 and is available for download in the BlackBerry App World!

We’re also launching a BlackBerry version of the Layar Player very soon, so any BlackBerry app can use Layar technology!

The BlackBerry Layar client is similar to the Android and iPhone 5.0 clients with a few exceptions, including that there is currently no Layar Vision beta for BlackBerry. For full details on these variations, please see our BlackBerry support announcement.