After hitting the 25 million mark for Layar app downloads in September, we’re very excited to follow that up with another amazing milestone announcement.

Since its launch just a few short months ago, over 20,000 people have signed up to create interactive print with the Layar Creator!

We’ve seen great activity on the Creator, and our users love it. (Just look at some of the amazing reactions we got from our recent event in Toronto!) In fact, of our 20,000 editors, half have created multiple Creator campaigns. And Creator users come from all over the world, encompassing 84 different countries.

So who are these 20,000 Creator users? They are magazine publishers like VIVA, Labelmag, Discovery and Voetbal International who enhance their editorial content, catalog publishers like Philips myshop, Pelgrim and vtwonen that let readers shop directly from the printed page, book publishers like Lonely Planet that create more engaging experiences for readers, professional journal editors like Neurosurgery that connect their digital resources with their publication, public service officials like the Dutch Nature Reserve that enhance the visitor’s experience, product manufacturers like CHOCSTAR that make their product packaging interactive, and much more!

Publishers and creative editors of all kinds are taking advantage of the Layar Creator to enhance their products. Here’s what our CEO Quintin Schevernels has to say about the Creator’s early adoption.

“We are overwhelmed by the number of editors signing up. This not only shows us the tremendous potential for interactive print, but also the added value of an online self-service tool,” says Schevernels. “We see a lot of people signing up and taking advantage of the possibilities augmented reality has to offer for their business. We expect this number to keep growing.”

So a big THANK YOU to those who have signed up for the Creator and have begun taking part in the interactive print revolution! Not signed up yet? Get started here!

Earlier today, Layar surpassed a monumental milestone. Across all platforms, the Layar app has now been downloaded over 25 million times!

We’re thrilled to hit the 25M mark, and we wanted to take this opportunity to thank you, the users of the Layar app, who made this amazing feat possible. We now average 1 million downloads each month as more and more people choose Layar as their AR app of choice.

“We’re seeing that mobile augmented reality is really starting to hit the streets,” said Layar CEO Quintin Schevernels. “AR is going mainstream, and we’re leading the way thanks to our loyal user base.”

Layar is the global leader in mobile augmented reality. More people download and use the Layar app than any other AR application on the market. So thank you again for making Layar the best!

The following is a blog post from Layar’s Dirk Groten.

Layar has had an exciting year since the introduction of Layar Vision last summer. Since then, we’ve made quite a few changes to our app and to the publishing platform. We changed the user interface to focus more on Layar Vision in 6.1 and added AR video in 6.2. We also introduced the Layar Creator, an easy tool to create content for Layar Vision, and we introduced a new app for user-generated AR, Stiktu. 

We haven’t always announced these changes much in advance, leaving our content creators in the dark about our future plans and commitments to them. Let me change this and give you a heads-up about what you can expect from us in the coming months.

Layar 7.0

The next version of the Layar app, Layar 7.0, will solve a number of issues our users are currently having:

• By separating Vision from Geo (location-based with POIs) layers we can switch off a few sensors when using vision AR. That way you won’t be bothered anymore by requests to switch on your GPS or to wave your phone in a figure-eight pattern due to compass interference when just viewing augmented content on top of printed materials.
• We’ll make it clearer to users that there are two sides to our app: Vision and Geo. We’ll open up in Vision (scan) mode like in Layar 6.2 but it will be clearer how to find the Geo layers. And we’re adding instructions to explain these two modes.
• We’re changing the UI drastically on Android to comply better to the Ice Cream Sandwich UI guidelines (Android 4.x), allowing the app to behave more like a native Android app.
• There are two API changes in Layar 7.0: In the getPOI request you’ll receive all images that were recognized instead of just one, and you can specify actions to share content specifically on Facebook or Twitter.

Let me emphasize that we are committed to continue supporting Geo layers in Layar. We strongly believe that geo-location and location-based content have an important role to play in AR now and in the future.

We will continue adding features for layer developers, both for Geo and Vision AR. When we introduced AR video in Layar 6.2, it was supported for both Vision as well as for Geo layers.

We decided to stop supporting a mix of Vision and Geo in one layer due to the confusing message to end users who didn’t understand what to do. It is still possible to link from vision to geo and vice versa by using the layar:// URL scheme (intent) if you still need to mix the two experiences.

Layar 7.0 is scheduled for release in early August.

Support for HTML Augments in Layar 7.1

So after Layar 7.0, what’s next? HTML content! Our next release after Layar 7.0 will introduce support for HTML augments. You’ll be able to create dynamic AR content by using content-type text/html for your AR objects.

This enables a whole bunch of new experiences, where the content viewed in AR is dynamic because it’s directly being fetched from the web. Let me list a couple of features we’ll support in HTML objects:

• WebKit support of HTML, CSS and Javascript. Since we’re using WebKit to render the content, a large part of what you can do in the mobile browser (Safari and Chrome) can also be done in AR. 
• You’ll be able to set the CSS pixel width and height of the HTML augment. The actual size of the augment in AR will be based on the existing ‘size’ parameter, like for images. 
• You’ll have the choice to enable or disable direct user interaction with the HTML content. When enabled, the content will behave like in a normal browser. For example, if you make a poll the user can click ‘yes’ or ‘no’ in AR and directly see the result in AR. When disabled, user clicks are passed to the Layar app and the usual POI actions can be triggered. For example, you can display an up-to-date live score for a tennis match that shows a mobile page in full screen with more information when the user clicks on it.

And again this applies to both Vision and Geo layers. Layar 7.1 is scheduled for release in October. 

Layar Creator

Of course we are committed to continuously improve the Layar Creator and add features that make it even easier to publish AR on print.

• We will make it easier to add video augments to your print. Due to some technical limitations there are currently a couple of different ways to add video. We’ll simplify the flow so you don’t have to worry about the technology anymore.
• We’ll add more standard buttons. The email button, for example, was meant to let users share something via email, but didn’t allow you to use it for contacting you (pre-filling the recipient email address).
• Support for HTML in Layar means we can also start adding more dynamic types of buttons in the Layar Creator. 
• And we’re working on a way for publishers to claim exclusivity on their pages, so that you can be assured no one else can ‘hijack’ your page. This assumes you’re the exclusive copyright owner of all artwork on the page of course.

Features in the Layar Creator will be rolled out regularly in small updates, watch our Layar Creator newsletter to be informed about the dates.

So that’s what we’ve got planned for the rest of the summer. We’re excited to keep making progress and hope you’ll join us. If you’d like to provide feedback, please visit our contact form!

Last week we hosted our “Activeer Print” (Activate Print) event here in Amsterdam for close to 100 attendees from the publishing, print and media industries. We were thrilled by the turnout and we’re very thankful for all who attended.

If you weren’t able to make it (and if you happen to understand Dutch) you can now watch the entirety of the event online! We’ve uploaded videos of the presentations (6 in total) to YouTube and embedded a playlist above.

If you’d like to follow along with the slides, you can find those for Raimo and Leonieke’s talks right over here.

Don’t speak Dutch? Still be sure to check out video number 5, a walkthrough of the Layar Creator by own very own Xuan Wang. It’s in English, except for a small bit at the beginning, so be sure to have a look.

Today in Amsterdam, we’re hosting our “Activeer Print” (Activate Print) seminar, which we invited members of the media and publishing industries to learn all about Layar and interactive print.

Our CEO, Quintin Schevernels shared some interesting new bits of data today with the audience in Amsterdam. We’ve been using Distimo Monitor to review our stats, and today we’ve got some exciting stats to share here on the blog as well.

Averaging 1M Downloads Each Month

Layar now averages roughly 1 million downloads of the Layar App for iPhone and Android each month. This is a significant leap from the first quarter of 2012, when Layar downloads averaged around 500k each month.

This increase in downloads parallels several new Interactive Print campaigns in recent months and the launch of the Layar Creator in June. More people are now downloading Layar to interact with their print products.

In our Layar whitepaper, released in May, we mentioned having just over 20 million total downloads all-time for Layar. Later this week, we will surpass 23 million downloads.

Layar Creator Takes Off!

It’s been just over a month since we launched the Layar Creator publicly, and so far we’ve been thrilled with the reception and usage.

To date, over 8,400 editors have started using the Creator, publishing over 4,500 campaigns of interactive print. That’s equal to roughly 125 new published campaigns every day.

Spreading Across the Globe

Traditionally, we’ve seen Layar’s popularity centralized around Europe. Our leading country, however, by a wide margin is the United States. The U.S. continually represents over 20% of Layar downloads. 1 of every 5 downloads is from the U.S.

It towers over any other country. In fact, the U.S. accounts for as many downloads as the combined total of the 2nd through 5th ranked countries - Germany, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands.

The majority of the remaining top countries, in terms of downloads, are in Europe, but recently we’ve seen new countries in new continents join the fray.

The biggest mover? It might be a surprise: Saudi Arabia. Just a few months ago, Saudi Arabia accounted for less than half of 1% of Layar’s total downloads. With just over 2,000 downloads in January, the Middle Eastern country has grown considerably to nearly 40,000 (over 4.5% of all downloads) in June.

Other countries on the rise include Brazil and Chile - our top South American countries. Each has increased its amount of downloads by 300% over the last six months, helping Brazil move among the top countries worldwide.

We feel this represents a globalization of Layar. It’s not just a European phenomenon anymore. Now, our top countries span the globe, across all continents. Check out the Layar Creator and get started with your campaign today!