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.

An artists’ rendering of the Twitter balloon inside the Oval Office.

Layar is nothing without its creative and highly-skilled developer community, so we thought it would be cool to include some blog posts from the mouth of one of the most renowned Layar developers/dreamers/artists we know.

Sander Veenhof (SNDRV) is the man behind some of the coolest and most talked about layers including Biggar, The Game of Life, and the MoMA AR Exhibition. We asked Sander to write about his latest collaboration with Mark Skwarek, a guerilla AR campaign that launched Friday, February 25 (Stay tuned for video coverage from this event as well).

Tweeting to Obama but not getting through? Since February 25th you can now reach him right at his desk in the Oval Office. A virtual Twitter balloon has been placed inside the White House and another one infiltrated the Pentagon using the GPS-based Augmented Reality browser, Layar. The balloons display the latest tweets containing the hashtags #OvalOfficeChat or #PentagonChat respectively.

The placement of the two Augmented Reality balloons was the mission of infiltr.AR, a live augmented reality infiltration event orchestrated from a temporary command centre at Club Karlsson in Amsterdam. It’s the latest experiment in crossing physical borders by members of the Manifest.AR artist group, best known for their previous infiltration project: an unofficial guerrilla exhibition inside the MoMA NYC last year in October.

An artists’ rendering of the Twitter balloon inside the Pentagon press room.

The virtual Twitter balloons inside the White House and the Pentagon can be seen ‘for real’ using Layar. Search and open the layer “INFILTRAR.” When not inside the two buildings, an ‘artist impression’ of the augmented space will appear, including an actual live copy of the Twitter balloon.

Since Manifest.AR members do not have press passes, and most probably never ever will, we are highly curious to see any screenshots of the virtual public message board inside the Pentagon press room, so journalists, give it your best shot! (And Tweet it hashtagged #pentagonchat please).

-Sander Veenhof and Mark Skwarek of Manifest.AR