In 2011, author, Martijn Arets, visited 20 inspiring companies around Europe to learn how to build a better brand. The stories and lessons he learned became the book Brand Expedition. 

What Martijn set out to do was to visit these companies and understand them better. This became reality when he quit his job and went on the road to interview CEO’s, founders and brand managers. He captured his findings on video and shared his experiences by blogging and tweeting while on the road. At each stop, he requested that each CEO ask the next CEO a question on video. To engage more with his growing audience, Martijn asked them to help pick out which company to visit next.  

While Arets set out to capture his expedition in a digital format, he found that a book was the best way to share the stories and lessons. The book he wrote based on his experiences was a great success in Holland, and he set about crowdsourcing an international edition.

To improve upon that success and tie his online content to the book, Arets and Layar teamed up. For the release of the international edition, Arets used Layar to enrich the book with video interviews of the CEO’s pan-company interviews. Each page enhanced with video content has the View with Layar logo, indicating to readers when the special videos are available.  

At Layar, we think it’s a cool book and a great way to use our platform. The videos fit nicely with the printed content of the book. It gives the book experience something extra, which keeps the reader more enaged and in tune with the “how to build a brand” message and lessons.

We are very curious how the readers will like it.

Watch the video below to see how it works.  You can buy the book here to experience for yourself.

Our friends over at Tribal DDB - a global digital advertising agency - recently employed the help of Layar Vision to enrich one of its projects. The project is a desk reference “calendar” that the company sends to prospective clients to inform them all about mobile.

It’s called “Mobile Engagement: A Guide to the Mobile World,” and now with Layar’s help, the calendar comes to life with augmented information within the pages. In the video above, we sat down with Joeri Kiekebosch, who worked on the project, to get an idea of how and why they chose Layar Vision.

“We had the feeling that a static desk reference was… static. And we’re a digital agency that does digital stuff, so we needed something that made it interactive,” Kiekebosch told us. “If you talk about mobile, you should be able to do something with your mobile. Why not scan the calendar with your mobile and see extra content on top of that?”

“There are a lot of big shots walking around here, and these people kind of like geekiness but are not geeks. AR is perfect for these people,” he adds. “Everybody has an iPhone, they were like ‘Oh this is cool, this is fun!’ They got it installed easily, they understood it. For these kinds of people it really worked.”

Take a look at our interview with Joeri to see the calendar in action!

It’s been well over a year since Layar partnered with The Rolling Stones to launch the first augmented reality campaign with a major rock band, and now we’re joining forces with the similarly-named music magazine, Rolling Stone.

Last month, with help from Layar, Rolling Stone has been hosting RS Fest - a month-long holiday festival during in the middle of New York City. The fun thing about this festival is that it brings a bit of the summer scenery back to the city in the middle of winter.

Park Here has erected an indoor pop-up park at 201 Mulberry St. in the heart of New York that features warm and cozy temperatures. New Yorkers can escape the cold of winter and step into springtime scenery with green grass, flowers and park benches.

And best of all, the venue has been brought to life with Layar Vision. Around the festival, pointing your device at large Rolling Stone covers will let you watch bonus behind-the-scenes videos featuring celebrities like Jimmy Fallon, Katie Perry, Conan O’Brien, Lil Wayne and even the infamous Snooki as they shot their iconic Rolling Stone covers.

The theme of the RS Fest venue is an outdoor concert in the park, and the area is populated with many small creatures. With Layar Vision, the creatures reveal exclusive live performances of up and coming musical artists like MNDR, Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr., and more.

With Layar, Rolling Stone has created a new way for fans to experience the iconic magazine covers and go behind the scenes with today’s hottest artists.

We’re excited to announce that Layar 6.0 including Vision is now available in the App Store, just in time for iPhone users to experience the awesome AR content in the latest issue of LINDA. magazine.

LINDA., the largest women’s glossy in the Netherlands, partnered with Layar to create the first Dutch augmented magazine, showing infotainment and commerce to be a natural fit with augmented reality.

More than 50 pages inside this month’s edition of LINDA. magazine have been augmented with digital buttons that enable readers to access additional digital content using their smartphones. These buttons link to specific websites, videos, app stores and phone numbers.

A total of 120 augments can be found throughout the magazine for readers to view and interact with.

 Some examples from the magazine include: 

• Unique backstage video footage of the cover shoot
• One-click access to sites selling the fashion featured in the articles
• The ability to book a test drive for the advertised cars

“We are thrilled LINDA. wanted to work with us and use Layar,” said Claire Boonstra, Layar co-founder. “Not just because it is a great magazine, but it proves what we said with the launch of Layar Vision; this is a utility that generates value for brands, retailers and online merchants by making physical items interactive.”

Watch the video to see LINDA.‘s pages come to life with Augmented Reality.

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Hot off the newswire:

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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