Layar is a Dutch company based in Amsterdam, founded in 2009 by Raimo van der Klein, Claire Boonstra and Maarten Lens-FitzGerald. They have created a mobile browser called Layar. The browser allows users to find various items based upon augmented reality technology.
Layar specializes in mobile augmented reality – the most popular medium through which the average person interacts with AR content. The mobile AR world consists largely of two different types of experiences: geolocation- and vision-based augmented reality.
Geolocation-based AR uses GPS, compass and other sensors in a user’s mobile phone to provide a “heads-up” display of various geolocated points-of-interest. Vision-based AR uses many of these same sensors to virtually display digital content in context with real-world objects – like magazines, postcards or product packaging – by tracking the visual features of these objects (Layar, 2012).