After much lively debate, our expert jury has chosen the winners of the Layar Creation Challenge!

The winning concepts show that augmented reality has a natural fit with commerce, adding real value to existing businesses. The top three winners were chosen because they show the potential to fundamentally change the way consumers purchase goods and services while on-the-go.

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Now that the jury session is in full effect deciding which of the 15 finalists will get a piece of the $55,000 prize money, we’re taking this “downtime” opportunity to share a few of the Creation Challenge concepts that we thought were great, but came up just shy of the final 15.

These concepts may not have fit the Challenge criteria as well as some others, but we do believe they hold a lot of potential and hope the developers will continue to build and promote these awesome Layar Vision experiences!

Take at look at these three ”Honorable Mention” concepts for the Layar Creation Challenge.

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Layar recently released Layar Vision, an extension of the Layar platform enabling visual search on the mobile phone, recognizing real world objects and showing digital content on top of them.

We organized the Layar Creation Challenge as a way to kickstart the Layar Vision launch by encouraging developers to create immersive Augmented Reality experiences with the beta client.

More than 200 developers registered for the Challenge, and we reviewed many great submissions, but we narrowed the list down to these 15 concepts that we believe best meet the Challenge criteria.

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During the developer workshop on August 18th, we announced the Layar Developer Challenge: Any developer who created after August 17th and submitted for publication before August 21st, midnight, would enter the Challenge. On Saturday morning, I found 7 layers in my inbox. All were ready for publication and needed at most minor changes to be approved.

These were the participants:

• Hoppala by Marc René Gardeya: What was briefly discussed during the workshop has already been realized: An aggregator layer! Complete with provisioning form for other layer developers to add their layer. The layer hasn’t been published yet and is looking for other layers to join in :-) Go to Marc René’s website if you’re interested.


• Miljoenhuizen (a million of houses) by Nico Schoonderwoerd (Twirus.com): A real estate site for the Netherlands with a potential to grow to many other countries in Europe. Very cool custom look. In the NL, search for ‘huizen’ to find this layer.


• Openingstijden (opening hours) by Hans Nauta (opentot.nl): Opening times of stores nearby, like supermarkets, DIY stores, etc… The cool thing is, the app gives you the opening times for today and tomorrow.


• Architecture Guide by Sascha Hendel (ArchInform): An original new kind of layer, that will inform you of the architecture of special buildings all over the world. And not just touristic landmarks, you’ll be amazed at the depth of their database, highlighting industrial buildings as well.


• Verbeterdebuurt (improve your neighborhood) by Johannes La Poutré (Squio.nl): Give feedback about the public space around you, like garbage dumps, neglected parks or dangerous traffic situations and view the feedback of others. The site is used by local authorities to improve the public areas.


• Hotpads by Doug Lewis (hotpads.com): The first real estate layer for the US. Very cool graphics, great number of houses in the database (well, enough houses for sale at this point in time…)


• Estaciones de Servicio (gas stations in Spain) by SIGNO (Jose Millares): The first layer to find the nearest gas stations, you can search by brand (e.g. type BP and only BP stations will be shown). The very cool feature is that the actual prices of gas are shown, so you can choose the cheapest one!

We’ve had a hard time judging this competition. All layers had their particularities making them stand out compared to the current directory of layers. Should we award based on originality? Design? Usefulness? Coverage? In the end we just followed our hearts, voted and found out that we unanimously agreed on the number 1 spot: ArchINFORM.

The prize for Sascha is a white HTC Hero, which will soon make its way from Amsterdam to Berlin.