Whether you’re a pro yourself, or your own photography skills begin and end with Instagram, everyone has looked at an incredible photo and wondered “How’d they get it to look like that?!?”

Multi-national camera and lens manufacturer Nikon is committed to answering that question in order to help less experienced photographers improve their skills, and (much to our delight) they’ve used Layar to create a mobile Augmented Reality experience aimed at educating amateur photographers.

Nikon Spots is a collection of photographs taken throughout the Netherlands (mostly Amsterdam and Rotterdam, at the moment), by members of Nikon Professional Services (NPS), that are geo-located to where they were shot. Each photo includes details about the camera settings used to take it as well as tips regarding position, composition, light and more.

The layer creates a highly-informative mobile experience regarding how to shoot a great photograph in your current surroundings, but if you want to see the full-sized photographs the content is also available on the Nikon Spots website.

Nikon’s NPS photographers will be continuously adding photographs to the layer in these cities and more, so there’s always something new to learn! You can also “Like” their Facebook page to get notifications when new spots are added.

Nikon worked with Netherlands-based development company Brightin to create the Nikon Spots layer, website, mobile web app (HTML5) and Facebook page.

The 54th Venice Biennale Art Exhibition opens tomorrow, and just in case you’re not familiar, it has been among the top cultural events in the world for over a century, specializing in the avant-garde and showcasing the latest trends in contemporary art. With an historically “high art” reputation like that, it’s practically begging to be co-opted by guerilla Layar ARtists.

So if you make it out to Venice this weekend, or at least before the end of November, here are a few art installments that only the “Layar elite” can see:

Manifest.AR Intervention The Cyber ARtist group returns with a series of eight “uninvited” art layers (see the full list here) consisting of their own pavilions that are actually competing with the “physical reality” pavilions via Sander Veenhof’s Battling Pavilions layer.

The Don Pigeon Placed in Venice’s famous San Marco square, The Don Pigeon stands tall among the flock of real-life pigeons for a unique photo opportunity. According to its creators, “Forget the Biennale, forget the Guggenheim, this is what you want to see this summer!”

Where’s Franco As a modern-day renaissance man, you can be sure that James Franco will be participating in a variety of activities at the Biennale. With the Where’s Franco layer, you can spot him in nine locations throughout the exhibition and even cozy up to him for a photo (let’s face it, this is the closest you’ll ever get).

Here on the blog we feature a lot of new layers with impressive 3D models or (more recently) animations, but sometimes, less is more. Many of the most popular and useful layers on the Layar platform are the simple and functional ones that provide relevant and plentiful information about one’s surroundings.

The new Cruzvirtual layer, a project created by Layar partners ElipseAD for major Spanish pharmaceutical cooperative Cofares, is a perfect example of how a simple-looking layer can be extremely effective.

The Cruzvirtual layer is a collection of nearly 20,000 pharmacies in Spain with location information and contact options for each. About 2,000 pharmacies in the database have also paid for the “premium” services, which adds email, hours of operation and social sharing capabilities to the pharmacy’s listing - a unique example of how developers can produce revenue from layers!

In the coming months, there are also plans to add a direct messaging system to the premium pharmacies that would allow customers to request products, pharmacies to solve customer issues and more.

In addition to being on the Layar Browser, Cruzvirtual is also available in a free, standalone app in the App Store.

At the beginning of the year, we introduced a big step forward in mobile augmented reality development - the Layar Player. This easy-to-use SDK allows those with a basic understanding of iPhone development to add fully-functional Layar AR into their very own apps by simply copying and pasting some code. Now layers don’t need to live within the Layar app itself, but can exist as their own app specially tailored to a specific purpose and experience.

Since then we’ve continued to expand our platform and enhance the functionality of Layar, and so it’s time to bring some of these improvements to the Layar Player.

The release of Layar 5.0 in April introduced several new features that help make augmented reality more interactive and social. These improvements are important for augmented reality as a whole because it helps the technology become more user-friendly. Now, with our latest iteration of the Layar Player SDK, developers can incorporate new Layar 5.0 features, including animation, into their own apps.

We still receive questions about the new functionality of Layar 5.0, so we wanted to use this opportunity to take an in-depth look at how developers can best take advantage of the Layar platform.

To show how current layers are using these features, we will showcase these features in the context of how one in particular - the Conquar game layer - has utilized them.

Social Sharing

With Layar 5.0, users can now connect with their friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter. A few simple authentications and Layar users can begin sharing all kinds of Layar content with the world. Users can even connect their Layar account with Facebook and Twitter, allowing them to log in with these networks.

When browsing layers in the catalogue, users can quickly share a layer in their Twitter feed or on their Facebook wall. Users also have the option to simply email details of a layer to their contacts, or to copy a short-link to the layer for any other social use.

Inside of a layer, clicking on a spot or POI will allow users to share that point on their social networks. As with layers, a personalized tweet-style message can be added to the item when it is shared, allowing users to add their personal touch.

With Conquar - a massively multiplayer AR game of territorial control - users can “attack” spots belonging to enemy teams in order to challenge that zone’s control. As they do so, they can also share their actions with Facebook and Twitter, encouraging others to join the fight. Screenshots can also be grabbed from directly within the layer and shared just as easily.

For users, these sharing capabilities enhance the interactivity of layers by allowing them to display their exploits to the world. It also attracts others to begin using these layers, creating buzz and generating growth of usage and content of a particular layer.

For developers, social sharing makes it possible to harness the viral nature of the social web in promoting content online. By encouraging users to share layers and content, developers can quickly and easily get their name out to public and to people who might be interested in using their layers.

Developers themselves can also promote their own layers by using the sharing functionality built directly into Layar. It is also possible to grab the data being shared, like screenshots, and aggregate it on a third-party website, creating a portal for your layer’s users to save, comment, rate, and explore items they’ve shared.

Animation

Another key component of Layar 5.0 is the inclusion of animation. Previously, 3D and 2D objects within layers were relegated to a life of paralysis. They simply sat in their position in the real world, limiting their ability to catch your eye and encourage interaction.

Now, however, any object in layer can come alive with animation. When spots appear in your vision as you experience the world through augmented reality, they can now drop into the screen, or grow in size or spin around. It’s a small change, but it goes a long way for creating a smooth blend between the real and digital worlds.

Users can also trigger animations by interacting with objects on the screen. Icons and 3D models - which can already have their own inherent animation by default - can be triggered to perform a secondary animation (such as growing, moving, rotating, etc.) as well. Additional attributes can be programmed into animations, such as changing speeds or positions over time.

These animation features have been intelligently incorporated into the Conquar game layer. The game shows icons representing locations to be conquered, and these icons grow in size when you focus on one. It’s almost as if the enemy icon is bearing down on your location, prompting you to attack it! It is also far easier to determine which icon you are currently viewing in the bottom info bar. Upon clicking one of the icons, it will spin in a slow circle as you view its info.

Putting it all together…

We’ve put together a video that sums up all of the great features of Layar 5.0, including the implementation in the Conquar game layer. You can see that video embedded below.

Developers can use these new features to create engaging and interactive augmented reality experiences for users on the Layar platform, but if you’d rather host your own app, the updated Layar Player SDK lets you do just that.

For more information and to download the SDK, visit our Layar Player page.

A 1963 photo of 4625 Springfield Ave. in Philadelphia overlaid onto the present location.

With each cool new history layer, we are reminded that Augmented Reality is a great way to display historical photos and information previously hidden away in government archives.

Currently on the Layar platform, you can see San Francisco’s historic Market Street before and after the massive earthquake in 1906 that forever changed the landscape, view the Berlin Wall as it stood between 1961 and 1989, uncover Civil War history and more.

The newest historical addition to the Layar platform, PhillyHistory, uses Augmented Reality to merge Philadelphia’s past with present.

Using content from the Philadelphia Department of Records’ online database (PhillyHistory.org), you can access nearly 90,000 historic images of the city, 500 of which are pinned to the current landscape in virtually their exact location in AR. Of those 500 images, 20 also contain additional information about the places in the photos created by the editors of The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia as well as local scholars.

This massive project was made possible by a Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The organization rewarded this grant to the City of Philadelphia Department of Records (DOR) in order to fund a research project that would investigate the use of Augmented Reality in displaying historic photographs as overlays on a view of the current landscape.

The DOR partnered with Philadelphia-based company Azavea to conduct the research on Augmented Reality and build the mobile phone applications. The two organizations published the results of this research in a free white paper available for download here. The paper also serves as a valuable resource for anyone interested in building on the Layar platform.

The PhillyHistory app is available in the iTunes Store as well as the Android Market, but you can also access it from inside Layar via the PhillyHistory AR layer.

Three phases in the evolution of the PhillyHistory layer