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AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS – September 20th, 2011 - Layar, the largest open platform for mobile augmented reality (AR), today announced they entered into a strategic partnership with Telefonica I+D for providing them with their market leading Visual Search Technology: IRIS. Visual Search enables Layar to search through millions of images to identify these images and correctly augment them on the mobile phone resulting in a more intuitive user experience.

Visual Search is a key component in the delivery of vision based Augmented Reality services to end-users. It makes it possible for real world objects to work as identifiers and/or hyperlinks for augmented reality experiences. Layar is adding IRIS Visual Search capability to their Layar Reality Browser, making it significantly easier for users to discover relevant Augmented Reality content.

The goal of Telefonica’s IRIS project is to develop a service that provides information related to an object just by taking a picture of it. The object needs no special packaging, tag or marker. For this objective, Telefónica I+D has developed and patented proprietary visual recognition technology. This technology enables the identification of objects such as supermarket products, logos, posters, or paintings among others. The collaboration of this project with Layar is framed within the Open Innovation initiative of Telefónica I+D.

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