There’s been a bit of turbulence in the Augmented Reality (AR) space lately with Metaio being acquired by Apple and Qualcomm selling its Vuforia business. Customers are understandably worried about the future of the AR market.

Here at Layar, since joining forces with Blippar in 2014, we’ve been able to continually provide top-quality, stable services and solutions. One of the key areas we’re very dedicated to is our Augmented Reality software development kit, the Layar SDK. We’re very proud to say that Layar SDK will continue to be a very important product for us going forward.

With the Layar SDK, you can quickly and easily embed our Augmented Reality technology into your existing mobile app, giving you the ability to create a custom AR experience for your users within your app.

House of Fraser, one the U.K.’s largest premium department store chains, recently integrated the Layar SDK into its apps to offer customers a unique mobile shopping experience with AR. In creating what he called an “experience that transcends the mobile web,” CCO Andy Hardin praised the Layar SDK, which the company was able to integrate “quickly and seamlessly.”

The Layar SDK is a powerful tool for mobile Augmented Reality development. With it you can embed your own AR content in your app, whether it be scannable “Vision” AR, or location-based “Geo” AR. You can even use our PhoneGap plugin to seamlessly integrate the Layar SDK into your app development workflow.

Layar has many solutions to fit your needs, and the Layar SDK is just one of them. You can learn more about our AR technology solutions here, or download and share this handy one-page PDF.

Just over a month ago, the news broke that Metaio, a fellow Augmented Reality provider, had stopped selling its services and had been acquired by Apple. Since then we’ve received a lot of messages from Metaio users inquiring about what Layar has to offer. With that in mind, we’ve created a helpful guide for anyone looking to transition from Metaio.

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^{By Dirk Groten, CTO of Layar}

This week, in collaboration with Metaio and Wikitude, we here at Layar are very excited to announce that we are adding cross-platform interoperability into our mobile Augmented Reality apps. This will allow location based content (like Geo Layers) to be viewed on any of three AR browser platforms – The Layar App, Metaio’s junaio browser and the Wikitude app – regardless of which platform the content was created for.

Back in February at Mobile World Congress, we came together with Metaio and Wikitude to demonstrate cross-platform interoperability during an Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) workshop. As of today, these capabilities are now supported by all three platforms. We will include interoperability in version 8.3 of the Layar App which is coming soon.

Publishers of location-based AR experiences can now use a single platform to create and publish their content and can use the new “ar://” scheme to promote their work. Users can open these experiences on any of the three AR browsers.

Right now, interoperability supports simple location-based points of interest (POIs) with a title, description and image. They can have basic actions with custom labels, including link to a website, get directions, make a call or SMS, play video or audio and send an email.

Features not supported include 3D models, complex interactions (scripting, server calls) and animations. The format used to exchange AR content is CARIF (PDF), which is based on ARML 2.0.

This is a huge step towards interoperability between the various AR platforms. We view this as only a first step, as a lot of work still needs to be done to get full interoperability between the various AR browsers.

We’re happy to see that our three companies were able to work together in such a constructive way to alleviate the pain of developers of AR experiences that have to work with so many different platforms. I’m looking forward to continuing this journey, and hoping that more companies can join this effort.