This is incredibly fascinating and quite a game changer for the mobile market. Layar has launched in the Netherlands. Duke Long sent me a link to this new technology… Layar calls it a mobile augmented reality browser. I call it the future!
Layar is a free application on your mobile phone which shows what is around you by displaying real time digital information on top of reality through the camera of your mobile phone.
Layar is available for the T-Mobile G1, HTC Magic and other Android phones in Android Market for the Netherlands. Other countries will be added later. Planned roll-out dates for other countries are not known yet.
If you don’t see the video in this post, be sure to click through to see the first mobile augmented reality browser! My mind is racing at the wondrous possibilities of a technology like this!
An amazing piece of software. Any idea on how they do it?
Looks like it's a combination of GPS and video, Adam. Really quite incredible. Imagine this with product and facial recognition. Instead of forgetting people's names, I could just point my address book at them!
It is an excellent demo – but it is here as in a lab someplace.
I can easily see this being done on the iPhone. That azimuth detector they put in there with the Camera and GPS will make for some amazing apps methinks.