Readers of Jackie magazine will find a nice addition to one of the magazine’s interviews in the current issue on newsstands today.

Dutch fashion designer Joline Jolink is profiled by Jackie in the magazine’s Style Files section, and she managed to include Layar alongside her interview. In her own words, here’s Joline’s take on how this collaboration came together.

“The magazine contacted me for the style page. I was immediately thrilled about the possibilities to use Layar on my images in magazines. They will make the step so much easier for women to explore my online store after seeing a publication,” she says.

“So, when Jackie asked for text and images, I offered them a picture of one of my favourite looks with the Layar logo in the corner.” 

The image Joline provided shows off her “summer must-have look,” and has been enhanced with Layar. Scanning the image shows a few simple buttons: one to Tweet about the look and another which links to Joline’s online shop to buy the items. It’s a really simple implementation, but it’s very effective for bringing readers of Jackie directly to a place where they can buy the items.

 

“I expected that Jackie would not recognize the icon or realize the wonderful extras it can bring to their readers, so I explained it to them up front,” adds Joline. “They then suggested to add a little info about Layar to the text under the picture.”

This is a perfect example of just how easy it can be to add engaging and deeply connected content to otherwise static print pages. Click through to see more photos of the Jackie magazine featuring Joline Jolink and Layar!

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Throughout the summer, we’ve covered some of the highlights of Bruce Sterling’s Layar-sponsored AR design class at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.

As all good things must come to an end, so has this class, but not without some impressive final student projects! Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be sharing videos of these projects as well as footage from the class presentations with Layar strategist Gene Becker making a guest appearance to offer comments and feedback. You can read all our posts related to the Design Class here.

This next project video is from students Daniel Young, Eugene Seo, Simon Tien and Trevor Freel. Harvest is a concept for a standalone app that uses augmented reality to display custom information for people with allergies and special diets; it is targeted at those with dietary restrictions due to health, ethical or religious reasons.

The team also started building a Harvest layer (still in testing) to locate nearby health food stores that cater to these types of dietary restrictions.

Check out the Harvest team’s impressive video (we’re suckers for motion graphics) for their awesome concept!

Harvest — Safe Food Discovery from Eugene Art Seo on Vimeo.

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The multitalented Celine Mornet (known professionally as LutinCapuche) may be a Flash developer by trade, but she also has a creative outlet that allows her to step away from the computer monitor: designing and sewing stuffed animals (or “plushes,” to be exact).

Celine started making these plushes purely or fun; she displayed her little handmade creatures online but didn’t intend to sell any until people started asking to buy them from her. She then decided to make purchases easier by creating an online store, and has recently made the experience more fun by also selling them in Augmented Reality.

We’ve talked about HPSC‘s Herve Pellarin and his virtual commerce (aka v-commerce) layers before, but these AR shops seem to be getting cooler with each new implementation. The LCPlush Anywhere layer, for example, has intricate character designs on the walls, 3D renderings of the plushes and images of the actual products.

Introducing LCPlush: the latest in V-commerce on the Layar platform.

Celine and Herve worked together in France, and it was Herve who gave her the idea for an AR shop. The two joined forces on this project and created the AR shop in only two weeks!

“This guy is amazing because he always has some innovative ideas,” Celine says. “Everytime time I talk to him I learn something new. He made me discover Layar, how it works and how I can use it to sell my plushes.”

The LCPlush Shop layer has geo-located stores in her own city of Montreal, Canada, as well as in Paris, Geneva and Annecy, France that you can literally walk into.

For everyone outside of Canada and France, there’s the LCPlush Anywhere layer that places you in the center of the store where you can view various stuffed curiosities like the Real Monsters-esque Croc Cochmar and the cuddly yet carnivorous CrockNFish.

You also can share your favorite plushes on Facebook or Twitter, access the item in the online store (where you can purchase it via PayPal), or call the company from inside the layer.

The adorable Crock Cochmar in the LCPlush AR shop.

Even with her online store and AR shop capabilities, Celine doesn’t want to increase the number of plush orders much beyond her current 10 or so per week (hand-sewing plushes can get very time-consuming). She is, however, interested in expanding her use of AR, which she believes is an exciting new way to diffuse a brand.

In the near future, Celine would like to add more elements to her LCPlush AR shop. For example, she wants to allow users to customize their own plushes in 3D and place them around the world.

“At the end of the day, the goal is to build a kind of huge LCPlush exhibition and organize some contests with plushes as prizes,” she says.

Celine plans to do more projects with Herve, but also plans to develop new, complex layers on her own using her newly-acquired Layar development skills.

If you’ve ever found yourself in an unfamiliar part of town needing that one item (be it a water bottle, allergy medicine or cigarette) so desperately that you feel like screaming it at the top of your lungs in hopes that someone will point you in the right direction, then the “Where Can I Buy?” layer is for you.

Let’s say you’re in Phoenix, AZ and you want to buy some Advil for your pounding hangover headache. Just type “Advil” into the search field and the “Where Can I Buy?” layer finds stores in your vicinity that carry the item.

Hover over the icon closest to you (which will also be the largest) and you see that it’s $7.99 at a Walgreen’s drugstore .25 miles away. Tap the icon and you can call the store, see a full listing and photo of the item, or view the location on a map. If you tap through to the full listing you can even see that the 80-count liquid gels are $2.00 off.

“Where Can I Buy?” is available in the United States, and was created by Howard Ogden, founder of AugmentReality.co.uk and Mobilistar. Ogden is an Amsterdam-based developer and top-tier member of the Layar Partner Network. His Layar portfolio runneth over with some of our most popular layers including the AR Beatles Tour, the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Your Street, and Funda. You can contact him at info@mobilistar.com.

Groupon offers daily deals in your area.

While coupon-clipping is a practice generally reserved for those who still pay for a print newspaper subscription, collective-buying companies like Groupon and Living Social are growing rapidly. Both companies also now have mobile apps that allow you to view and purchase daily deals on-the-go and redeem them digitally (saving time and trees, yay!).

Layar developer and Anca 3D co-founder Juan de la Torre (a recent Canadian transplant from Colombia) used Groupon’s open API to create a layer that displays nearby Groupon deals. You can search by keyword (like “restaurant,” for example) and even purchase deals from inside the layer by signing in with your Groupon account information.

Currently, the Groupon API is only available in the US and Canada, so the layer is only available in those countries as well.

The Groupon by Anca 3D layer shows you daily Groupon deals in your area.

The ability to not only see how close Groupon’s daily deals are to your current location, but to also tap through and purchase the deal directly from the AR view would be a great added feature for Groupon’s official mobile app, especially because the already functional, well-branded layer is an ideal candidate for Layar Player integration.

Hopefully Groupon will get on board and add de la Torre’s AR content to its existing app!

Anca 3D is a Columbia and Canada-based Augmented Reality development company co-founded by Juan de la Torre and Andres Cardoso. The company provides AR solutions for offline, online and mobile platforms.

You can contact Anca 3D via @anca3d_AR on Twitter or email Juan de la Torre at juan.delatorre@anca3d.com.

Click here to launch this layer on your mobile device.