Mr. Mobile: Get Layar'd

Jay Goldman: Hi I'm Jay Goldman and you are watching Mr. Mobile and today for the first time ever we've actually stepped outside of the Butterscotch Studio so that we can show you a really cool augmented reality application called Layar. Now before we get into that you might be wondering what is augmented reality. If you've ever heard of virtual reality, this is kind of a half way step towards the promise of that technology. Virtual reality or VR has always been about immersing yourself in a computer generated world and being able to interact with it, if you've ever seen Star Trek for example think about the holodeck as the ultimate virtual reality environment. Augmented reality or AR involves layering computer intelligence on to the world around you. The promise of this technology has always been stuff like a having a pair of glasses or when you walk up to people that you are running to on the street it reminds you off their name and their spouses name and their kids and the name of their dog and what they love doing for weekends, so that you've got something to talk about. That's kind of the promise of augmented reality. What we are seeing right now is a whole generation of apps for mobile devices and we are particularly talking about Androids and iPhones and most recently specifically about iPhones that are all about using the build in video camera here the GPS and the compass to be able to provide you with a view of the world around you that you wouldn't otherwise know. So annotated or augmented reality to help you find things that are actually in the physical world around you. There had been a couple of high profile AR releases for the iPhone recently. Yelp and Urbanspoon come out with new versions that help you find restaurants and café's and that sort of thing. We are going to look today at a company of the Netherlands called Layar who are producing application called Layar and that application which is available for free in the iTune store as always check the butterscotch.com show notes for your download link allows you to turn on and off different layers, hence the name of augmented reality about the world around you. This is the kind of thing that sort of hard to describing easy to show, so I actually was going to jump directly into Layar on my phone right now and we are going to see what it's telling me what's surrounding us right now. When you jump into it, you are on your favorites view and by default that includes local search powered by Google. There are some other options here for featured layers that they've provided and popular layers which are the most popular ones available in this system. I am a big fan of this one by GoWeb3D which is a Wikipedia Layar that takes entries from Wikipedia and layers them on the world around you. You see when you are looking through the view here, we are seeing a live view of the camera on my phone and over layed on top of that is position information about Wikipedia entry. So we happen to be pointing towards Portugal village and as we turn around like this the phone automatically shows us other entries. You can see which way we are facing and where the entries are, you can see a brief description of it, if you'd like to see information about another one you can tap directly on it and at any time you can tap on the this little arrow here and that will take you to the more information. Typically that includes a link to a website so the Wikipedia entry or you can see take me there and that will actually use the maps application built into my iPhone take my current position and where I'd like to go to and show me the direct way to walk between those two places. So there are whole bunch of different layers that you can use inside the application the Wikipedia is only one of them, you can do things like locate subway stops that are near you, find restaurants, any information that somebody has encoded and made available as a layer. The application is free it's a lot of fun to play with even if you are just standing in your living room, but if you can get outside and actually discover the world around you it's a little bit more interesting. And if you are really into this and you'd like to start creating your own layers, check the Layar website for more information about how to do that. I am Jay Goldman, this is with Mr. Mobile, thanks for watching, check butterscotch.com for more episodes and we'll catch you next time. Butterscotch - Tasty Tech; Delicious Downloads. Butterscotch.com, a division of Tucows Corp. Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/