After a lot of questions and activity on our google groups we decide to create a tutorial that is fully focused on 3D. This tutorial will take you through the basic principles of 3D modeling and how to get your 3D models in a layer.

Besides that we also learned a lot in the past couple of weeks. We used all the questions and feedback that we received in our tips and tricks topic within the tutorial.

• Which phone do you have? Brand and model (e.g. Motorola Droid, etc…)


• Which OS version do you have? (e.g. Android 2.0.2, etc…)


• Rooted or clean?


• If you have an iPhone, we need your UDID: Connect your iPhone to iTunes, select your iPhone in the left column and click on the serial number. This will change to show the UDID. Even though you cannot select this ID, you can now copy (Edit -> Copy) and paste it.


• If you have an Android device, please send us the IMEI: This can be found on the phone under Settings -> About this phone.

Yesterday Layar v3 was published in the App Store. After a flood of complaints that the app crashes for many users, we’ve decided to remove the app from the store. Sorry, sorry, sorry.

We had issues already since the very first launch of the iPhone app. Unfortunately these issues were due to bad memory management decisions right from the start, something that we could not easily fix without completely re-engineering the app. There is some old code in there that is buggy and we don’t know exactly where the bug is. Since the app worked fine for 80% of the users (and on all our testing devices), we decided to move on to v3 before we would rebuild the framework of our app. We’ve tested v3 thoroughly internally and did not have any issues with crashes when submitting to the App Store. In fact, we still cannot reproduce the crashes that many of our users are reporting right now.

The percentage of users with crashes has grown too much with the launch of v3 to justify keeping the app online. We don’t want our users to be confronted with an app that is unusable due to systematic crashes. We take great pride in our product and are very serious about delivering high quality to our users and our developer community. We’ve already started re-engeneering the app, but this won’t be finished in a matter of days, rather a matter of weeks.

Our sincere apologies to our developers who put a lot of effort into making great content for Layar v3 that can now only be viewed on Android. We are proud of the layers you made and we will put all our efforts into making them available on the iPhone as soon as possible.

Dirk Groten
CTO Layar

Due to the holidays we will not review your pending layers for publication between 18th of December and the 4th of January. So if you want to publish your layers before Christmas please do this asap.

Layer Developers,

This is just a quick post to mention one of the new features in the Layar 3.0 Publishing site: Required Features.

Just to be clear, - all of your v3 layers are handled gracefully on v2 clients. Any v3 features you use will be downgraded the best we can. So, for instance, if your layer is trying to use a flexible radius, but someone is using the v2 client, the range will be set to 1500 (the default). The client will not use flexible radius because it can’t.

If a v3 functionality is crucial for the layer to work properly, you
can use the ‘Required Features’ pop-down to select which features you require. If the user is using a version of the client that does not support that feature, the layer will not appear in any lists.

I hope this clarifies the Required Features list a bit.