Augmented Reality Event 2011 was again provided with an inspiring keynote from Microsoft’s Blaise Aguera y Arcas, creator of Photosynth and architect of Bing Mobile and Bing Maps.

Last year, Blaise provided ARE attendees with a keynote similar to his well-known TED talk on Photosynth. Blaise was equally impressive this year in Santa Clara, providing a keynote on big data and augmented reality - an intersection we appreciate here at Layar.

In his presentation Blaise talks about how Photosynth is evolving and he ends with his latest project: Read Write World. A very impressive project about crunching all available big data to “index, unify, and connect of the world’s geo-linked media. Consisting of a cloud-based geo-indexing, matching and processing services.” All code is intended to be open source, serving an example of what big companies can aspire to.

Once again, we’ve got video for those who couldn’t make it to ARE this year, so check out Blaise’s great talk below!

This week Layar attended Microsoft’s MIX11 event at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, where the corporate vice president of Windows Phone, Joe Belfiore, showed a demo of the Layar app running on Windows Phone 7 during his keynote, making Layar quite possibly the first Augmented Reality application to run on the Windows Phone 7 platform!

The demo was shown to support Windows Phone 7’s new “Mango” update’s features, which support Augmented Reality applications by allowing developers to access motion sensors (namely the accelerometer, gyroscope, compass and location sensors) as well as the camera.

To demonstrate Mango’s new AR capabilities, Microsoft’s implementation of the Layar browser showed a layer called “Tweets @ MIX11” that displayed tweets from the conference. While no official plans to offer Layar in the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace have been put into motion yet, the demo shows that the platform is now well-suited to support sensor-intensive applications like Layar.

This video is a short clip of the 2-hour keynote, but you can watch the presentation it its entirety via Channel 9.

Would you like to see Layar on Windows Phone 7? Leave a comment!