Layar

» see layar.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

layar's peak years overlap my time working as a software engineer, but the ar browser category never reached me at meaningful scale. i would have needed a 2010 smartphone with stable compass and accelerometer behavior, plus a use case worth holding a phone up at in ankara. neither was present. ar browsers were also a category that depended on third-party publishers, and the publishers in turkey were a thin layer compared to amsterdam or london or san francisco. i read the tech press writeups but never installed the app.

raimo van der klein launched layar in amsterdam in june 2009 with co-founders claire boonstra and maarten lens-fitzgerald. the core product was a phone app that fused the camera feed with gps, compass and accelerometer data to overlay floating tags on top of whatever the phone was pointed at. third parties published these overlays as "layers" of points of interest. tourism layers showed monuments, real-estate layers showed apartments for sale, art layers showed gallery info. the world economic forum named layar a technology pioneer for 2011. by september 2011 the platform hosted about three thousand layers.

blippar, the london ar startup, acquired layar in june 2014 for around four million pounds, mostly for the patent portfolio and the user base. layar's amsterdam office closed in 2016. the standalone layar app was discontinued around 2018, and blippar itself entered administration in december 2018 after funding fell through. the co-founders publicly said in january 2019 that they wanted to buy back the ip and try again, but the rebuilt layar never returned.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what the ar browser actually showed you ~

the ar browser idea was simple. you opened the camera, pointed it at the street, and the phone drew icons floating in front of buildings to mark restaurants, atms, real-estate listings, or tourist landmarks. you selected a "layer" the same way a desktop user selected a website. behind the scenes the phone read its compass heading and accelerometer pitch to figure out where you were looking, then asked layar's servers for the points of interest within view.

the limits were the hardware. compasses on 2010 phones were noisy. the overlay icons drifted as you moved the phone. the accuracy of gps in dense city blocks was a few meters either way, which was enough to plant a restaurant tag inside the wrong building. layar was a serious attempt to solve those problems before phone sensors caught up to them.

~ how blippar swallowed it ~

blippar acquired layar in june 2014 because layar had the patent set and the user base, and blippar had the ad-led brand-recognition pitch. the two products were supposed to merge into a unified ar platform. instead blippar kept sprawling into face recognition, automobile recognition, urban navigation, then indoor navigation. each new feature pulled engineering away from the core layer publishing tool. by 2018 layar was operating on minimal updates. when blippar's funding round failed in december 2018, the administration filing pulled layar down with it.

~ the long tail ~

the layar app was useful as a proof that the ar-on-mobile category was real before either arkit or arcore existed. apple and google later shipped the same camera-based overlay capability inside the operating system itself. once the camera and the sensors and the indoor maps were native, the standalone ar browser stopped making sense. the visual idea of an icon floating in front of a building is now a default behavior of google maps live view and apple maps look around. layar built the first commercial version of that, then got buried under a parent company that ran out of runway.

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