Each year since 2004 during the week before Christmas, Dutch radio station 3FM hosts the Serious Request donation drive to benefit a specific charity chosen for that year. The station’s DJs live for 6 days in a glass house erected in a public square as they broadcast on radio and TV around the clock, drawing big crowds and even bigger donations.

For this year’s fundraiser in the Dutch city of Haarlem, Serious Request has teamed up with AR developers Dutch Rose Media to create interactive AR postcards with their Layar-powered app Smilez. The postcards are being sold for €2, and €1 from each card will be donated to Serious Request.

When scanning one of three different postcards with the Smilez app (it also works with the Layar App), users will see a video play right on the card as it comes to life. One card features a holiday themed greeting, another shows a brief video tour of the city of Haarlem, and the third features imagery from this year’s charity theme, “Hands Off Our Girls.”

The theme of the fundraiser aims to raise money and awareness for female victims of sexual assault during war and conflict. Last year’s event to benefit charities fighting child death from diarrhea (humorously titled “Let’s Clean This Shit Up”) raised over €12 million ($15 million), with roughly half being donated on the final day of the drive, Christmas Eve.

To try it yourself, have a look at the Smilez-enhanced Serious Request postcards. If you’d like to purchase one, you can do so at the Smilez website.

The San Jose School in Valladolid, Spain is using Augmented Reality and the Layar Creator to help teach young students a multitude of important skills.

Nacho Herrero, ICT Coordinator for Primary Education at the school, recently made use of Layar to help engage kids in an education activity based around the various systems of the human body. The students, ages 9 to 10, created hand-crafted posters illustrating the functions of the systems with information gathered from searching the Internet.

They then used the Layar Creator to connect the information they found online – videos, photos, links, voice recordings, etc. – to the physical posters. By scanning the various posters from their class and others with the Layar App, they could discover more about the systems through AR and the Internet.

To see what the students created, try scanning some of the posters yourself. You can also read more about this project (in Spanish) at Nacho’s blog.

Earlier this month, the Vodafone Institute hosted a one-day summit in Berlin called “digitising europe – Opportunities for the Next Generation,” which included interactive elements built with Layar’s Augmented Reality technology.

The goal of the event was to discuss and debate how the continued digitization of the business, work and education fields can spur growth in Europe, and featured a keynote by German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The invite-only event featured 350 business leaders, politicians, innovators, entrepreneurs, academics and students.

Creative agency TRIAD, which was responsible for the organization and guest management of the event, made use of Layar to bring certain aspects of the event to life with AR. Attendees were surrounded with opportunities to experience AR from the very start as the event’s invitations featured scannable content.

Additionally, the event program, wall banners and table displays could be scanned with Layar to reveal extra content, including videos of speakers and social media links. TRIAD made a strong effort to inform attendees with multiple calls-to-action, including artwork on the invitation, program, attendee name tags, interactive displays and even a mention by the moderator during the event.

Certified Layar partner Lumenal Code has teamed up with design team Acme Scenic to produce interactive AR murals for a Nike sales conference in Las Vegas.

The installation, which took place at the Red Rock Casino and Resort, consisted of 5 murals, each approximately 12′ tall, with LED lighting embedded in channels within the murals. When attendees scanned any of the murals with the Layar App, they came to life with interactive animations educating them on new digital sales tools, as well as behind-the-scenes videos of how the murals were created.

“The purpose of our installation at the conference was to provide a fun, artistic introduction to this new set of digital tools,” says Lumenal Code. “Every night, while attendees slept, we updated the content so the next day they had a completely new experience scanning the murals.”

“The animations contained links within them that brought you to one-pages about the digital sales apps, as well as information about an on-going raffle that had the answers hidden within the murals,” the company adds. “There was also a link a series of behind-the-scenes illustrations and time-lapse video showing the creation process for the murals.”

You can learn more about this installation over at Lumenal Code’s website where they have more photographs of the murals and example of the behind-the-scenes video.

Volkswagen is the latest in a number of large automakers to add Augmented Reality and Interactive Print to its marketing strategy. Similar to Nissan Canada’s print takeover from 2012, Volkswagen has launched a sizable newspaper ad campaign in its home country of Germany with Interactive Print enhancements placed front-and-center.

A full twelve-page advertisement in Welt am Sonntag (Germany’s largest Sunday newspaper) shows off the new high-tech features of the 2015 Volkswagen Passat with videos that play right off the page when scanned with the Layar App. Additionally, readers can play with an interactive widget using Layar to view the new Passat with their own choice of color and rim style.

In total, the ads will be part of a circulation of over 400,000 newspapers. The pages have also been compiled into a brochure that will be distributed to every German Volkswagen dealership, as well as select business hotels including Radisson, Grand City Hotel, and Holiday Inn. Over 164,000 copies of the booklet are initially being shared.

The campaign was produced by Volkswagen’s German advertising agency Grabarz & Partner, with digital content production by Mackevision and zweiteHeimat. Limebizz, an Advanced Layar Partner, was employed to help with the AR and Interactive Print items.

So far the campaign has been a success, including some attention from the local press. To give it a try yourself, scan these examples with the Layar App.