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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Layar recently released Layar Vision, an extension of the Layar platform enabling visual search on the mobile phone, recognizing real world objects and showing digital content on top of them.

We organized the Layar Creation Challenge as a way to kickstart the Layar Vision launch by encouraging developers to create immersive Augmented Reality experiences with the beta client.

More than 200 developers registered for the Challenge, and we reviewed many great submissions, but we narrowed the list down to these 15 concepts that we believe best meet the Challenge criteria.

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Here at Layar, we want to see the coolest content possible on our platform, so we often help facilitate relationships between proven top-notch layer developers and the brands, publishers or other clients looking for technical help to bring their Augmented Reality concepts to life.

We created the Layar Partner Network to publicly recognize these top-notch developers, and to provide a channel for more personal communication so we can keep up with their latest Layar projects more efficiently. 

What started as a short list of mostly Europe-based developers such as TAB worldmedia, Mobilistar, Muzar and HPSC, has since blossomed into a 55-member group from all across the world!

We recently added three new Partners, and we’d like to introduce them to you!

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As we previously mentioned, Maarten Lens-FitzGerald recently attended the Stream 2011 conference in Athens and brought along some cool new Layar Vision concepts!

These giant posters now hang proudly in our office for those who enter Layar HQ to experience, but we also created a demo video to share that experience with everyone!

If you downloaded the Layar Vision beta (Android only) you can try the Stream11 layer for yourself using these reference images.

Otherwise, just check out the demo video!

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