Groupon offers daily deals in your area.

While coupon-clipping is a practice generally reserved for those who still pay for a print newspaper subscription, collective-buying companies like Groupon and Living Social are growing rapidly. Both companies also now have mobile apps that allow you to view and purchase daily deals on-the-go and redeem them digitally (saving time and trees, yay!).

Layar developer and Anca 3D co-founder Juan de la Torre (a recent Canadian transplant from Colombia) used Groupon’s open API to create a layer that displays nearby Groupon deals. You can search by keyword (like “restaurant,” for example) and even purchase deals from inside the layer by signing in with your Groupon account information.

Currently, the Groupon API is only available in the US and Canada, so the layer is only available in those countries as well.

The Groupon by Anca 3D layer shows you daily Groupon deals in your area.

The ability to not only see how close Groupon’s daily deals are to your current location, but to also tap through and purchase the deal directly from the AR view would be a great added feature for Groupon’s official mobile app, especially because the already functional, well-branded layer is an ideal candidate for Layar Player integration.

Hopefully Groupon will get on board and add de la Torre’s AR content to its existing app!

Anca 3D is a Columbia and Canada-based Augmented Reality development company co-founded by Juan de la Torre and Andres Cardoso. The company provides AR solutions for offline, online and mobile platforms.

You can contact Anca 3D via @anca3d_AR on Twitter or email Juan de la Torre at juan.delatorre@anca3d.com.

Click here to launch this layer on your mobile device.

With Black Friday and Cyber Monday behind us and December in full swing, it’s officially holiday shopping season. With that in mind, Orange España - one of the largest telecom providers in Spain - has decided to use Layar to help its customers find their way to retail locations. This marks the first time a telecom provider in Spain has used Augmented Reality in its marketing and promotions.

The layer is called “Tiendas Orange” (or “Orange Shops”) and is available to view in Spain. When using the layer, iPhone and Android users will be able to find Orange retail locations using Layar’s Augmented Reality view as they hold their phones up and look around.

Using Layar to locate various POIs in the real world is one of the tried and true use cases for Augmented Reality, but Orange - the 7th largest telecom provider in the world - has taken things a step further. When users locate the nearest store, they will also be able to view promotional materials, coupons and enter contests to win prizes like digital cameras, GPS receivers, camcorders, DVD players and more.

“With this launch, Orange, as a company committed to innovation applied to customer satisfaction, offers a new way of relating directly and intuitively through its commitment to augmented reality technology,” says Alicia Calvo, Director of Innovation at Orange España.

If you’re in Spain, be sure to use Layar look up the “Tiendas Orange” layer to find locations and view deals and promotions from Orange España.

Layer: Tiendas Orange
Location: Spain
Required: iPhone or Android device
More info: Orange.es
Developer: Orange

Augmented reality has a long history with advertising in the automotive industry, but Audi has taken it a step further with the launch of its A1 in Russia. People in a handful of Russian cities can use Layar to visualize how the new car will look in the natural environment using a 3D model of the snazzy ride.

The layer was created in cooperation between developers AR Door and creative agency Rodnaya Rech and is part of a broader campaign by Audi which involved a contest recently run on Facebook. Users could visit various sites around each of the cities to view the car and could enter to win a free test drive by sharing a photo of the car in Layar to the Audi A1 Facebook app.

“The challenge for us was to create some unique AR experience,” says Irina Kharseeva of AR Door. “That’s why we used in the layer 3D objects instead of simple 2D icons. Audi A1 is the first layer with 3D in Russia.”

According to AR Door, over 1,600 users registered for the Facebook group. The winners of the contest will be announced on the 9th of November.

Check out a video below of the Audi A1 layer in action, and if you’re in Russia, look around for the car using Layar!

Vodafone Hungary worked together with their agency Soda Team to create a layer for one of the biggest music festivals in the world: Sziget. A fine exmple of a good sponsored layer. A short Q&A with Horvath Tibor, Sales and Marketing Director of Soda Team.

What is the Sziget layer about and what does it offer?
The Sziget layer provides all necessary information for visitors of Sziget 2010, one of the 10 largest festivals of the world. It is a useful tool for the visitors to get the most out of the festival.

People can find the different stages and its’ programs. Using the reality view beside the stage one can see the band currently on stage with the band’s picture, the upcoming bands and the exact time when the next band will start playing. Clicking on a band you will be guided to the bands profile page and you can get all information about the band. There are two more action buttons. “Get me there” which is very useful considering the size of the venue and the large number of programs. The other action button is the “program” which brings you to the full weekly program of the given stage. From the program item list you can again click further to the profile pages of the bands (over 300 bands are playing during the festival).

The different types of information groups are represented with different icons to make it easier for the users to navigate in the reality and the map views. There is also a filtering function that helps to screen out the most relevant pieces from the large database.

Why did you want to create such a layer?
Soda Team is a long term partner of Vodafone in Hungary. When Vodafone became the main sponsor of the Sziget festival this year, the company started to boost up the venue with innovative offers and solutions. We learned about AR technology 1,5 years ago, and followed Layar as our choice of solution provider ever since. We already made plans for other companies highlighting the possible advantages of using Layar and AR, but the possibilities of the technology where best fitting the needs of such a venue, and an innovative company as Vodafone.

What are the advantages for creating festival layers?
The advantages for users are obvious: Everybody carries his phone on the festival, but who likes the mass of paper that one needs for navigating from one stage to another. Having a complex layer, like the “Sziget Compass” makes all conventional tools of navigation look out of date.

What did you learn about creating festival layers?
One of the most important insights we learned, is that you have to make a POI (point of intrest) something complex, informative and sexy to become a real alternative for usual program guides and maps. Therefore we attached programs to the POIs and band profiles to the programs. The differentiation of the POIs by icons is unavoidable when having such a large amount of data.

The Layer Developer
The technical realization of the layer was done by mCRUMBS, run by Martin Adam. They are an “Augmented Reality Server Provider” with 15 Augmented Reality Channels Running on their servers.

The layer of this week is the first layer that has been published on our Augmented Reality platform which has 3D texture animations. Quiznos, a big fast food restaurant in the United States and Canada, is specialized in toasted sandwiches used the Layar platform for their campaign. The Quiznos layer includes a store locator, several videos, animated 3D and location based coupons. We talked to Mathijs Gajentaan from Winvolve who developed this layer for Quiznos.

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How did you manage to get a brand this big on board? First and foremost: Showing them what’s possible. At the outset of most projects, our clients will have an idea of what they want to achieve. But when we’re given the opportunity to unleash our passion for our technology and really show them what’s possible, that’s typically when great things happen. Ultimately it is those case studies that help us attract new clients.

Was Quinzos familiar with the Layar concept? They were keen on AR, and found Layar to be the perfect solution.

What is the added value of this layer for Quiznos? For this question I asked Quiznos for a quote because they can explain the added value for Quiznos the best

Tim Kraus,  Interactive Marketing Manager Quiznos: “The added value of Layar to Quiznos is keeping our brand relevant. As more people use their smart phones to connect with their world, we need to make sure we have a presence in that world without appearing spammy. Location Based apps like Layar is a great fit for Quiznos. In addition, this app allows us to pull in people from demographics we may not have targeted before.”

Your worlds first with 3D animation within a Layar. Was it hard to realize this? We really saw this as a great opportunity. Our animation specialists worked on Movies, Games and Architecture before and were very excited and motivated to develop something amazing using 3D models and animations for the Layar platform. On the technical implementation side we also recieved help from our partner Hoppala.eu.
What can we expect from Winvolve in the near future? Important for us is helping people develop a better understanding of Augmented Reality technology and its possibilities. You can expect us to play a role in that through projects that educate and inspire.