House of Fraser, one the U.K.’s largest premium department store chains, is now offering its customers a unique mobile shopping experience with Augmented Reality (AR) technology from Layar.

By integrating the powerful Layar SDK into its existing mobile app, House of Fraser now allows customers to “Scan to Explore” and shop for products directly from its catalogue through AR. Customers can quickly shop and access immersive content, like videos, music 3D product previews, recipes and lookbooks.

The Layar SDK allows for a seamless integration of AR technology into existing mobile applications. House of Fraser also used the app commerce platform Poq to quickly and easily create a customized mobile AR experience for their customers.

Read more »

Zalando, Europe’s leading online-only shoe, fashion and accessory retailer, has integrated Layar’s technology into its iOS app to provide an exclusive Augmented Reality experience with the holiday issue of Zalando magazine for users in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

15 pages within the magazine have been made interactive, giving readers a unique print-to-digital shopping experience that connects items in the magazine with their digital counterparts on the Zalando website. A variety of Augmented Reality features wow readers as photography comes alive with behind-the-scenes videos, and 360-degree experiences give them new views of top products, and much more.

Using the Layar SDK, Zalando has incorporated Layar’s Augmented Reality and Interactive Print technology directly into its own existing app for iOS in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. By keeping users in the same app, the Layar SDK enables a more familiar interface for Zalando’s readers to experience the interactive AR elements of the magazine.

“This new feature is a great opportunity to offer our customers additional inspiration for gifts, festive outfits or even their own wish list,” said Arne Schepker, Vice President of Brand Marketing at Zalando (translated from the company’s German press release). “With videos, music and 3D views, we encourage interaction with our customers and make our brands and products even more vivid.”

Users can download the Zalando iOS app at http://www.zalando.de/zalando-apps/.

Readers of Jackie magazine will find a nice addition to one of the magazine’s interviews in the current issue on newsstands today.

Dutch fashion designer Joline Jolink is profiled by Jackie in the magazine’s Style Files section, and she managed to include Layar alongside her interview. In her own words, here’s Joline’s take on how this collaboration came together.

“The magazine contacted me for the style page. I was immediately thrilled about the possibilities to use Layar on my images in magazines. They will make the step so much easier for women to explore my online store after seeing a publication,” she says.

“So, when Jackie asked for text and images, I offered them a picture of one of my favourite looks with the Layar logo in the corner.” 

The image Joline provided shows off her “summer must-have look,” and has been enhanced with Layar. Scanning the image shows a few simple buttons: one to Tweet about the look and another which links to Joline’s online shop to buy the items. It’s a really simple implementation, but it’s very effective for bringing readers of Jackie directly to a place where they can buy the items.

 

“I expected that Jackie would not recognize the icon or realize the wonderful extras it can bring to their readers, so I explained it to them up front,” adds Joline. “They then suggested to add a little info about Layar to the text under the picture.”

This is a perfect example of just how easy it can be to add engaging and deeply connected content to otherwise static print pages. Click through to see more photos of the Jackie magazine featuring Joline Jolink and Layar!

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! Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be sharing videos of these projects as well as footage from the class presentations with Layar strategist Gene Becker making a guest appearance to offer comments and feedback. You can read all our posts related to the Design Class here.

This next project video is from students Daniel Young, Eugene Seo, Simon Tien and Trevor Freel. Harvest is a concept for a standalone app that uses augmented reality to display custom information for people with allergies and special diets; it is targeted at those with dietary restrictions due to health, ethical or religious reasons.

The team also started building a Harvest layer (still in testing) to locate nearby health food stores that cater to these types of dietary restrictions.

Check out the Harvest team’s impressive video (we’re suckers for motion graphics) for their awesome concept!

Harvest — Safe Food Discovery from Eugene Art Seo on Vimeo.

Read more »

The multitalented Celine Mornet (known professionally as LutinCapuche) may be a Flash developer by trade, but she also has a creative outlet that allows her to step away from the computer monitor: designing and sewing stuffed animals (or “plushes,” to be exact).

Celine started making these plushes purely or fun; she displayed her little handmade creatures online but didn’t intend to sell any until people started asking to buy them from her. She then decided to make purchases easier by creating an online store, and has recently made the experience more fun by also selling them in Augmented Reality.

We’ve talked about HPSC‘s Herve Pellarin and his virtual commerce (aka v-commerce) layers before, but these AR shops seem to be getting cooler with each new implementation. The LCPlush Anywhere layer, for example, has intricate character designs on the walls, 3D renderings of the plushes and images of the actual products.

Introducing LCPlush: the latest in V-commerce on the Layar platform.

Celine and Herve worked together in France, and it was Herve who gave her the idea for an AR shop. The two joined forces on this project and created the AR shop in only two weeks!

“This guy is amazing because he always has some innovative ideas,” Celine says. “Everytime time I talk to him I learn something new. He made me discover Layar, how it works and how I can use it to sell my plushes.”

The LCPlush Shop layer has geo-located stores in her own city of Montreal, Canada, as well as in Paris, Geneva and Annecy, France that you can literally walk into.

For everyone outside of Canada and France, there’s the LCPlush Anywhere layer that places you in the center of the store where you can view various stuffed curiosities like the Real Monsters-esque Croc Cochmar and the cuddly yet carnivorous CrockNFish.

You also can share your favorite plushes on Facebook or Twitter, access the item in the online store (where you can purchase it via PayPal), or call the company from inside the layer.

The adorable Crock Cochmar in the LCPlush AR shop.

Even with her online store and AR shop capabilities, Celine doesn’t want to increase the number of plush orders much beyond her current 10 or so per week (hand-sewing plushes can get very time-consuming). She is, however, interested in expanding her use of AR, which she believes is an exciting new way to diffuse a brand.

In the near future, Celine would like to add more elements to her LCPlush AR shop. For example, she wants to allow users to customize their own plushes in 3D and place them around the world.

“At the end of the day, the goal is to build a kind of huge LCPlush exhibition and organize some contests with plushes as prizes,” she says.

Celine plans to do more projects with Herve, but also plans to develop new, complex layers on her own using her newly-acquired Layar development skills.