The time has come to leave our old home at Rietlandpark on the east side of Amsterdam for our brand new home in the center! It was a huge undertaking to pack up the company and shift to our new office just a few kilometers away, and it wouldn’t have been possible without the work of our office manager Charlotte and her helpers - so kudos to them!

So you can feel like you were part of it too, here are some photos from our move, including photos of our sparkly new office at Vijzelstraat 20. To see more photos and to see high-res versions of the ones posted here, head on over to the Layar Flickr page. Enjoy!

Boxes and crates used to pack up our old office.

Monitors are all lined up and ready to go.

Read more »

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.

Read more »

After much lively debate, our expert jury has chosen the winners of the Layar Creation Challenge!

The winning concepts show that augmented reality has a natural fit with commerce, adding real value to existing businesses. The top three winners were chosen because they show the potential to fundamentally change the way consumers purchase goods and services while on-the-go.

Read more »

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!

Read more »

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.

Read more »