Ever since we released the Layar Vision Beta less than two weeks ago, we’ve been waiting patiently for real-life examples to surface. Sydney, Australia-based digital artist Yiying Lu, best known for designing what later became the famous Twitter Fail Whale, ended the wait today with her Walls 360 layer video!

Lu worked with Layar Partner Rob Manson and his third-party Layar tool BuildAR to create an interactive Augmented Reality experience that you can launch from the custom wall decals that her successful Walls 360 company makes.

A select few of these wall decals will come with pre-defined AR content that you can also add your own content to through a web-based interface.

The project got some attention from The Next Web today, so they’re off to a fantastic start. We can’t wait to try it out!

Yiying Lu announces AR wall art project from buildAR on Vimeo.

If you’ve created an immersive Augmented Reality experience using the Layar Vision beta and want us to share it, let us know! You can send photos or video links via our Twitter or Facebook, or email them to content[at]layar[dot]com. 

We also encourage you to submit your awesome Layar Vision content to our Creation Challenge for a chance to win a piece of the $55,000!

Recently, we revealed our new Layar Vision extension and announced the Creation Challenge. Now, the Layar Vision beta is available and the Challenge is open for submissions!

“Augmented Reality is at the stage where it can add real value to existing businesses,” said Maarten Lens-FitzGerald, Layar co-founder and General Manager. 

“This is what we are focusing on with our challenge; we’re not looking for just a cool layer using Layar Vision, but for creative, smart business ideas that will provide lasting value for both user and publisher.”

We’re giving away a total of $55,000 in cash to 10 developers who create the most useful, creative or otherwise impressive experiences with Layar Vision; we want to see content that really makes us say “Wow!”

You can now download the Android APK beta and begin building with Layar Vision! Public versions for both Android and iPhone will be available in the coming months.

Please submit your Creation Challenge layer anytime between now and September 15th. After the submission deadline, we will determine the finalist short-list and announce it a week later.

Our internationally-acclaimed jury of AR enthusiasts, including: Layar co-founder and CEO Raimo van der Klein, Wired UK editor-at-large Ben Hammersley, sci-fi author and AR wizard Bruce Sterling, former AdMob evangelist Russell Buckley and author/futurist Gerd Leonhard, will judge and rank the finalists to determine the top 10 ranking.

Important Challenge dates:

• August 15: Submissions open
• September 15th – Submission deadline
• September 22nd – Finalists announced
• October 3rd – Winners announced

Please visit our Layar Creation Challenge page for complete rules and details, peruse our documentation, and direct any questions or comments about the Challenge to Challenge[at]Layar[dot]com.

Good luck!

Updates:
[0:45 am] The latest news from Amazon: Lightning hit a power plant supplying power to the Amazon infrastructure. They’re working to restore power.
[8:40 am] Most of our services were back online at 4:00 am this morning. Still, indexing of our layers for the Nearby catalog page is not working and analytics on layer usage might not be running correctly. All in all, not a very good night to start the week.
[5.45 pm] We are fully operational again. Amazon has handled this the best they could actually and were very clear today in their communication to us about how to get back all our RDS instances. 

At the moment of writing this post, our services are still down. This is our longest ever major service disruption since we moved our services to Amazon’s Web Services infrastructure 18 months ago. Four hours ago, at 8 p.m. Amsterdam time, I was warned by Jurg, from 9Apps.net, that there was major connectivity loss in Amazon’s network. That was just 5 minutes after the problems started.

Since then I’ve been continuously following #AWS on Twitter and looking at our AWS dashboards to see the progress. It’s frustrating, there’s nothing you can do except wait. You read of other web services in Europe that are down. You know Amazon engineers are probably working their best to get things back to normal. And you hope that when they do, you don’t have to restore from backups.

Right now, the instance serving this blog is working. So we’ve redirected our domain to point to the blog for now. Best thing you can do if you need Layar, is wait till Monday. I’m sure we’ll be back online by then.

Dirk, CTO

On a scale of 1-10 for exciting Layar announcements, this one goes to 11; we proudly present… Layar Vision! 

With Layar Vision, digital experiences are launched from visual triggers like magazines, posters and newspapers. Layar Vision uses computer vision techniques to augment objects in the physical world. 

The Layar browser can tell which objects in the real world are augmented because the visual fingerprints of the objects are preloaded into the application based upon the user’s layer selection. When a user aims their device at an object that matches the fingerprint, the app instantaneously returns the associated AR experience. 

This new functionality lets layers become truly immersive as seemingly ordinary objects come alive with interactivity. 

“We are really excited about this release. Mobile devices can finally ‘see’,” said Maarten Lens-FitzGerald, Layar co-founder and General Manager. “By adding Layar Vision we are taking an important step towards making augmented reality more effective. With Layar Vision we enable developers to create easy and fast user experiences. It quickly detects multiple enriched objects around a user at any given time.” 

Layar Vision can easily be added to existing location-based layers, so developers can essentially “upgrade” the layers they already have to include Layar Vision. We’ll be including this feature in our next major Layar Player update as well, allowing simple integration with standalone apps for both iPhone and Android! 

To kickstart the launch of Layar Vision, we’re hosting a Layar Creation Challenge, worth $55,000 in total cash prizes! The 10 developers who create the most useful, creative or otherwise impressive layers with Layar Vision will receive anywhere from $2,500 to $15,000! 

The winners will be chosen by our international jury of AR wizards. We are releasing the Android client and publishing platform with Layar Vision enabled in beta in the coming weeks so you can start building! 

Registration is now open, so enter today! To get started, take a look at the documentation and watch our Layar Vision video for inspiration!

The Layar-sponsored augmented reality design class being taught this summer in California is still truckin’ along, so we thought we’d take this opportunity to share another video from the class.

This time we have a presentation by Layar artist Sander Veenhof, who is known for using Layar in his augmented reality art projects like the Pentagon/White House Infiltr.AR and the Museum of Modern Art AR “Uninvited” Exhibit. In this presentation to the students at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, Sander explains his history as a digital artist using augmented reality, as well as his idea of “invisible augmented reality”.

He also talks about how he uses the term “Free-D” (instead of 3D) because technology has opened up a limitless world for expression. As for what exactly “invisible augmented reality” is, you’ll just have to watch his presentation to find out. So check out the video below to see Sander’s talk in front of the AR Design Class in Pasadena.