As more people enhance their world through Augmented Reality, we are continuously looking for new ways to help developers easily offer this experience within their own apps. At this moment adding Augmented Reality in your own app is a real hassle. White label solutions are in most cases very costly. Free open tools don’t give you the features, support nor the desired experience you want. Until now. Enter the Layar Player.

We are introducing a simple line of code that can help developers easily build an augmented reality experience into their own iPhone app. The Layar Player simply plays your published layer right in your iPhone app. This solution is by far the easiest way to get augmented reality in your iPhone app.

To kick things off, we are supporting 10 developers with their ideas during our beta program. See below for details on how to enter and get started.

What does the player do?
The Layar Player can be compared with a video of YouTube which you can embed on a website. The Layar Player plays any of your layers you configure it to play. It shows the layer content in the newly designed Augmented Reality view, map view and list view. Through its authentication solution there will be a seamless handover to the player when personal data is being exposed.

What does it cost?
You can embed our player in your app and benefit from all the features, our platform has to offer now and in the future, for free.

How do I get it to work in my iPhone app?
The Layar Player will be a binary and one header file that you can embed in your own application by adding the project in Xcode. This project will open the AR view to your published layer without the need to have the Layar Reality Browser installed.

Unfortunately, you’re no longer able to register for this beta program.

A challenge for users is to discover popular Augmented Reality content which is located around them. The latest iPhone release of the Layar Reality Browser solves this. From now on the Layar app starts with a list of nearby popular augmented spots. From this list users can select a spot they like and play the associated layer in Augmented Reality.

Other changes are a new navigation tab bar. The tab bar is used to quickly switch between Nearby, Layers, Search and Yours. Also we updated the search functionality. It now searches both spots and layers.

This latest version of the Layar Reality Browser is available now for download in the App store.

More Relevance
In the previous version users first needed to choose a specific layer, either from the featured or the popular list, before they could see content. This worked well with a limited amount of layers. The amount of layers has now grown to over 1.200, many of which are great local layers. In this new version users don’t need to choose a layer to see relevant and available AR content, the app right away opens with it.

Android users have had the nearby augmented reality search ability since June. The Android release has shown that users discover more local content and are no longer confronted with layers that don’t contain content around their location. Layer owners like brands, publishers and agencies now can be sure that their content will be shown when it is relevant: when the user is nearby.

How the new nearby screen works
On top is the “compass” with all spots plotted in a 360 degree view. This shows you exactly where all spots are located.

Each spot in the list has a category icon like Games, Fun or Food & Drink. Next to that, the title of the listed spot is shown as well as the layer title. Also the distance to the spot is displayed. On the right-side of each list item there is a “play” icon which opens the layer with the spot in focus. When a list item is tapped more information of the specific spot is shown.

Slide a spot to the left or to the right to see other options. A spot can be seen on the map, saved or you can select to hide content from this layer from your nearby view. This hide option comes in handy when for example during a concert you want to hide all tweets which most likely will fill up the list at that specific moment.

You can find your hidden layers in the your filter settings (top left corner). Other filters are amongst others a custom search range which can be enlarged when in a rural area.

The list is refreshed by pulling the complte list down. The list starts with 10 spots. More popular spots can be loaded by taping “load more items” at the bottom of the list.

Meet up with the Layar co-founders in California or China next week, Sunday September 12th till Friday September 17th.

Raimo van de Klein will be at Google Zeitgeist on Sunday and Monday. Meet him there to see a kick-&^% demo. Tuesday Raimo will be in San Fransisco to lead a panel on Augmented Reality at Appnation. Wednesday he will be at the Where Location Business Summit in San Jose. Let him know if you want to meet up.

Maarten Lens-FitzGerald will be at the World Economic Forum “Summer Davos” event in Tianjin, China. Layar’s main Chinese developer, Anjuke, made a demo layer for him to use and you to see. Search for Anjuke in your Layar browser. Maarten will participate in several sessions, amongst others: Looking into the Future of Mixed Reality and Live from China, about online video. Let him know if you want to meet up.