if (window.location.href === 'http://site.layar.com/company/blog/') { location.replace('http://www.layar.com/blog/'); } Well, it’s been a fun ride with WordPress, but we have finally finished migrating the Layar website and blog content to a new service, which means new URLs for your bookmarks and RSS feeds.

Feast your eyes on our blog’s attractive new “minimalist” look: http://www.layar.com/blog/

Other new URLS:

• RSS Feed: http://www.layar.com/blog/feeds/latest/
• Blog updates by mail: http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=layar-blog

See you all there!

As a special exhibition for Australia’s 2011 National Science Week, (August 13-21) some talented folks are bringing dinosaurs back from extinction; and it doesn’t require frog DNA or Jeff Goldblum.

The Jurassic Science Week layer features life-sized 3D models of old favorites like Stegosaurus and Tyrannosaurus Rex, as well as some lesser-known species like Chungkingosaurus and Parasaurolophus, all of whom are happy to pose for a screenshot photo with you.

In fact, taking screenshots with the AR dinosaurs could pay off in more ways than just enviable new Twitter/Facebook photos (c’mon, we know you’re just as big of a dinosaur geek as we are), because iiNet is hosting a competition for the best human/dino screenshot. The winner(s) will receive a new iiNet modem or a year of free broadband service!

The Jurassic Science Week layer is a collaboration between the creatives at Scitech, the stellar development skills of Valance Phua at iiNet, and the Australian government’s Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research.

For those of you who can’t make it to Australia next week, here’s a sneak peek at a few of Jurassic Science Week’s 3D dinos:

Updates:
[0:45 am] The latest news from Amazon: Lightning hit a power plant supplying power to the Amazon infrastructure. They’re working to restore power.
[8:40 am] Most of our services were back online at 4:00 am this morning. Still, indexing of our layers for the Nearby catalog page is not working and analytics on layer usage might not be running correctly. All in all, not a very good night to start the week.
[5.45 pm] We are fully operational again. Amazon has handled this the best they could actually and were very clear today in their communication to us about how to get back all our RDS instances.

At the moment of writing this post, our services are still down. This is our longest ever major service disruption since we moved our services to Amazon’s Web Services infrastructure 18 months ago. Four hours ago, at 8 p.m. Amsterdam time, I was warned by Jurg, from 9Apps.net, that there was major connectivity loss in Amazon’s network. That was just 5 minutes after the problems started.

Since then I’ve been continuously following #AWS on Twitter and looking at our AWS dashboards to see the progress. It’s frustrating, there’s nothing you can do except wait. You read of other web services in Europe that are down. You know Amazon engineers are probably working their best to get things back to normal. And you hope that when they do, you don’t have to restore from backups.

Right now, the instance serving this blog is working. So we’ve redirected our domain to point to the blog for now. Best thing you can do if you need Layar, is wait till Monday. I’m sure we’ll be back online by then.

Dirk, CTO

Near the end of World War II, the Polish Home Army fought for its capital’s freedom in the 63-day (August 1 – October 2, 1944) battle against Nazi Germany occupation known as the Warsaw Uprising.

The conflict did not end in the Polish Home Army’s favor, however, and it cost many Polish soldiers and civilians their lives. In the aftermath, Nazi soldiers and collaborators orchestrated massive looting efforts and set fire to the capital, leaving Warsaw utterly devastated.

The Warsaw Uprising Museum hosts a comprehensive collection of photographs, film, personal recounts and other historical information from the Uprising, which serves as a memorial to the soldiers and families killed during the conflict. Starting this week, the 67th anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising, you can use the Warszawa’44 layer to access historical images and information linking the geographic connections between modern Warsaw and the war-torn capital in 1944.

The Warszawa’44 layer was created by the Warsaw Uprising Museum and Polish Augmented Reality company Adv.pl. Check out the video they made to show off the layer (it’s in Polish but you still get the idea).

On a scale of 1-10 for exciting Layar announcements, this one goes to 11; we proudly present… Layar Vision!

With Layar Vision, digital experiences are launched from visual triggers like magazines, posters and newspapers. Layar Vision uses computer vision techniques to augment objects in the physical world. The Layar browser can tell which objects in the real world are augmented because the visual fingerprints of the objects are preloaded into the application based upon the user’s layer selection.

When a user aims their device at an object that matches the fingerprint, the app instantaneously returns the associated AR experience. This new functionality lets layers become truly immersive as seemingly ordinary objects come alive with interactivity.

“We are really excited about this release. Mobile devices can finally ‘see’,” said Maarten Lens-FitzGerald, Layar co-founder and General Manager. “By adding Layar Vision we are taking an important step towards making augmented reality more effective. With Layar Vision we enable developers to create easy and fast user experiences. It quickly detects multiple enriched objects around a user at any given time.”

Layar Vision can easily be added to existing location-based layers, so developers can essentially “upgrade” the layers they already have to include Layar Vision. We’ll be including this feature in our next major Layar Player update as well, allowing simple integration with standalone apps for both iPhone and Android!

To kickstart the launch of Layar Vision, we’re hosting a Layar Creation Challenge, worth $55,000 in total cash prizes! The 10 developers who create the most useful, creative or otherwise impressive layers with Layar Vision will receive anywhere from $2,500 to $15,000! The winners will be chosen by our international jury of AR wizards.

We are releasing the Android client and publishing platform with Layar Vision enabled in beta in the coming weeks so you can start building! Registration is now open, so enter today!

To get started, take a look at the documentation and watch our Layar Vision video for inspiration!

You may have noticed that the Layar blog has gone a bit quiet lately. Don’t worry, we’re still alive, but we’ve been hard at work these days on some new ideas that we think you’re really going to like. In the mean time, we thought we’d take a moment to pass on a few items that have come across our radar in the past week or so.

Personally, I’m a history buff so I would encourage you to check out the WW2Museums.com layer. It takes advantage of a huge database of locations related to World War 2, including museums, monuments, cemeteries and general points of interest from all over Europe and the United States. You can browse the database on their website as well – it may surprise you what you might find right around the corner!

We have a bit of company news to share as well, as we bid farewell to one of our earliest employees, Nanda! You maybe remember our “Meet Layar” profile of Nanda back in February, but in case you need a refresher, she has been Layar’s Office/HR/Management Assistant since nearly the very start. Nanda made sure everything around the office ran smoothly, and we will miss her dearly.

And finally, to leave you with a bit of entertainment and wonderment as we head into another summer weekend, have a look at this impressive AR demo. It’s another in a long line of intriguing hacks of the Xbox Kinect system, and it’s pretty amazing how well the 3D model sticks to the tracker used. And to top it all off, the model features live animation mimicking the motion of the person standing infront of the Kinect.

Enjoy that for now, and don’t worry, we’ll have plenty to share with you in the coming weeks. Just you wait.

Last week we informed you about SVK, or Secret Visual Knowledge, a very special new graphic novel by Warren Ellis and Matt “D’Israeli” Brooker. The limited-run comic, set in the not-too-distant future, tells the story of a secret device that allows its user to see the thoughts of the people he or she looks at.

The story has obvious influences from augmented reality, as these thoughts pop up around people’s heads when viewed through the device. To bring an interactive and immersive element to the story, the comic comes with a small UV light readers can use to see hidden messages written in the artwork with invisible ink.

Today, we want to give you a glance at what this all looks like, since the comic has, in fact, sold out its first printing. To do that, we put together a quick demo video, which shows off the hidden ink features and gives you an idea for how the story works. You also get to see a special full-page Layar advertisement which makes use of the invisible ink in a context Layar users will find familiar.

So check out the video below and visit http://getsvk.com/ to order your copy of the comic when it enters a second printing!

Every day we see lots of great new layers published on the Layar platform, so we thought we’d give you a quick heads-up on some that caught our attention lately. Layar is used in many ways all over the world, and here’s three layers that demonstrate this well.

Night of the Nerds – The Netherlands

NEMO, the science center located here in Amsterdam, is hosting a sequel event to last year’s first Night of the Nerds. The event features clinics, speakers and, of course, people doing science! To promote this year’s installment, NEMO has created a promotional layer that features a 3D spaceship trailing a banner for the event behind it. The theme from “The Twilight Zone” plays as you focus on the spaceship, which hovers over the location of NEMO.

Celebrity Homes – United States

Forget buying one of those over-priced star maps the next time you’re touring Hollywood, this layer has all you need. Want to join the paparazzi and stalk celebrities, but need helping tracking them down? Then look no further than the Celebrity Homes layer, available in the U.S. for all your star gazing desires. Each of the over 300 locations are in either Hollywood or Beverly Hills, and feature a link to further information about the occupant of the home. If you’re in the area, go hunting for actors, athletes and rock stars and send us your screenshots!

Autobuses Málaga – Spain

In Spain, the EMT (Spanish transit authority) and Orange have teamed up to provide bus riders with a layer featuring the location of bus stops in the city of Málaga. Now residents and visitors to the Spanish city can easily find the nearest bus stop, and as an added bonus, can view the estimated wait time for the next bus. The layer is part of a commitment to sustainability and innovation on the part of the EMT, and they hope the layer will attract more users to the bus system.

We’re all a aflutter today over “Peeling Layers of Space Out of Thin Air,” an awesome new multi-layer project on the Layar platform from a group of talented architects at Architecture OMI in Ghent, NY.

The project uses beautiful interactive 3D models and animation, as well as other Layar 5.0 features to create a truly immersive AR experience!

If you can make it to Ghent, NY for the opening this Saturday, July 9, we’d love to see your screenshots and videos!

In the meantime, check out this impressive video of Kol/Mac‘s “What is Space?” layer.

More event details after the jump…

OPENING SATURDAY JULY 9 2011 6:30 PM – 8:30 PM

Architecture Omi presents

Augmented Reality: Peeling Layers of Space Out of Thin Air

AUGMENTED REALITY BY ARCHITECTS @ OMI

http://www.cleater.com/peeling/

Architects: Acconci Studio, Asymptote, Cleater Studio, Kol/Mac, Metaxy, Leeser

Architecture, Studio Daniel Libeskind, SHoP, and SITE

Curator: John Cleater / Program Director: Peter Franck

Adviser and Documentation: Mark Skwarek and Will Pappenheimer

THE FIELDS SCULPTURE PARK at OMI

1405 County Route 22 Ghent, New York 12075

Bring your smart phone for an evening of architecture in the landscape.

By pointing your iPhone or Android at the sky, you will see virtual pieces of architecture

installed in the physical landscape at Omi.

For more information email architecture@artomi.org, visit www.artomi.org or call 518-392-4740.

Our friends at BERG London have just launched SVK, a special limited-run graphic novella (yes, a comic book) penned by the redoubtable Warren Ellis and illustrated by the equally formidable artist Matt “D’Israeli” Brooker.

“First and foremost SVK is a modern detective story, one that Ellis describes as ‘Franz Kafka’s Bourne Identity’. It’s a story about cities, technology and surveillance, mixed with human themes of the power, corruption and lies that lurk in the data-smog of our near-future.”

Through its protagonist Thomas Woodwind, SVK weaves a tale of two realities — the black-and-white, here-and-now surface of the world, and the unspoken thoughts that exist in the ur-space between the story’s characters. The interplay of direct perception and intraception are cleverly exposed through the book’s use of a special UV printing ink that only becomes visible under ultraviolet light, for which BERG have supplied a small UV torch. In SVK, there’s the world apparent to the naked eye, and then there’s the unseen layer of meaning all around, waiting to be discovered by the well-prepared reader.

Which is where we come in: Layar has sponsored it’s first ever print ad in the pages of SVK! Given the themes of cities, technology and hidden layers of reality, and the chance to work closely on creative with the amazing BERG team, it was a natural fit. And of course, the ad itself consists of multiple layers of reality…so order your copy of SVK, fire up your UV-spectrum Special Viewing Kit, and trawl through the corruption and lies to discover the Secret Visual Knowledge within.

As the summer continues, so does the Layar-sponsored augmented reality design class being taught in California to eager design students at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. To give you a closer look at the class, here’s another video into which you can sink your teeth.

Anyone who knows Layar and follows this blog knows our outspoken co-founder Maarten Lens-FitzGerald gives talks all over the globe on a somewhat regular basis. However, you may not have seen a talk quite like this from Maarten before.

To kick off the design class’ semester, Maarten provided an introduction of Layar, the company’s history and where it stands today, some examples of the platform’s capabilities as well as a look into the future and where Layar thinks augmented reality is headed.

So check out the video below of Maarten’s talk. It’s a quick snapshot that summarizes many key and interesting points surrounding Layar and augmented reality.